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THE FAITH OF A MIDDLE- 
AGED MAN 



THE FAITH OF A 
MIDDLE-AGED MAN 

A LITTLE BOOK OF REASSURANCE 
FOR TROUBLED TIMES 



BY 

HENRY KINGMAN, D.D. 

Senior Pastor of the Claremont 

Church, Claremont, 

California 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO 



^M 






N^ 






Copyright 1917 
By frank M. SHELDON 



/ 

OCT -51317 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 






k> 






TO MY FRIEND 



PREFACE 

THIS is not a book primarily for scholars 
or for students of theology, but for 
plain people — the men and women whom we 
are meeting daily in our homes and on the 
streets, preoccupied with innumerable cares. 
There may chance to be scholars and theo- 
logians among them; but, if so, their interest 
in these chapters will come not from their 
wisdom but from the elemental heart-hunger 
that is common to us all, the hunger after a 
life made satisfying by its hold on God. 
So it is not a book on theology but on suc- 
cessful living. Not by one who has suc- 
ceeded, but by one who has been much helped 
by Him who did succeed and is still 
bringing wavering followers to a triumphant 
issue in the face of heavy odds. 

Henry Kingman. 



The Anchorage, Colorado Desert^ 
April, 1917, 



SOME OF THE CHAPTERS OF THIS 
BOOK HAVE APPEARED IN THE 
BIBLICAL WORLD, AND ARE NOW 
PUBLISHED WITH THE CONSENT OF 
THAT PUBLICATION. : : : : : 



CONTENTS 





Part I 






THE GROUND OF FAITH 




CHAPTER 

I 


Life's Need of Faith . . . 


PAGE 

3 


II 


The Appeal of Middle Age 


8 


III 


The Years of Attrition 


18 


IV 


Faith's Inner Citadel . . . 


30 


V 


The Life as a Witness to the 






Truth 


44 


VI 


The Personality of Jesus . . 


62 


VII 


The Witness of the Life-Stream 


74 


VIII 


The Place of the Cross . . 


94 



Part II 
THE OUTLOOK OF FAITH 

IX The Fact of God 117 

X The Divine Outlook on Man . 138 

XI The Good Fight 160 

XII The Discipline of Pain . . . 186 

XIII Overcoming Under Difficulties 203 

XIV The Hope of Everlasting Life 225 
XV The Unending Fellowship . . 235 



Part I 
THE GROUND OF FAITH 



THE FAITH OF A 
MIDDLE-AGED MAN 



CHAPTER I 

Life's Need of Faith 

THERE is no doubt that the charac- 
teristic note of our day is not faith 
but criticism. Yet it is equally certain 
that there have been few generations so 
weary at last of the temper that doubteth 
all things, and so eager for faith if one 
but knew where to find it. For, after all, 
a man's faith in God is his most precious 
possession, for the simple reason that, 
as a man of great spiritual discernment 
said long ago, " This is the victory that 
overcometh the world, even our faith." In 
persistently fair weather he may not realize 
how priceless its assistance is; but at a time 
like this, when the whole world is forced to 
grope anew for the soul's adequate re- 
assurance in the presence of immeasurable 
disaster, it is the one unchoked fountain of 
comfort and courage. It is hard to see how 
a nation or a man can live nobly without it. 
For most of us this needs no argument. 

3 



4 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

Our own experience has forced us to this con- 
clusion. Life, we have been told, is an affair 
of honor. And so indeed we have found it. 
It is a trust involving heavy risks. We take 
it up light-heartedly at first, but as years go 
by and disillusionments set in we begin to 
see what manner of enterprise it is we are 
engaged in, and our attitude toward it 
grows less confident. We may grow out of 
humor with it, or dwell reproachfully on the 
way in which it has failed to keep its early 
promises; we may lose heart under its burden 
or sit cowed beneath its blows of evil fortune; 
we may come to abuse it, or treat it with 
cynical contempt, or even refuse it altogether. 
But to go on and on, in spite of all, morning 
and afternoon and evening, faithfully meeting 
the call of each new day until, in Stevenson^s 
phrase, we have " got cleanly off the stage,'' 
this is indeed an engagement of honor that 
some of us are hard pressed to keep. We 
need in it not only all our own inward re- 
sources of strength, but every help of faith 
that eager hearts in days gone by have ever 
found. 

For, as in every affair of honor, there is 
only one possible course that an honest man 
can follow; and that is the way of unhesi- 
tating fidelity. Anything less than this is 
unthinkable. No refusal or evasion or com- 
promise, nor any sort of faltering or rec- 



Life's Need of Faith 



reancy, is so much as to be considered. 
As Louis Pasteur said, simply, when his 
friend Deville spoke of the danger of his pro- 
posed studies of cholera in the South, " What 
about duty?" That is the last word for 
men of honest purpose, even though it be a 
hard one. If courage is demanded, then 
courage must somehow be found, and re- 
siliency enough to meet every rebuff and 
partial overthrow. It is by no means 
enough to win through life with a kind of 
stoical doggedness — a dour persistency that 
refuses to be dislodged from the way of 
duty even though the days are gray with 
doubt and the future holds no hope of better 
things. It is possible to go on grimly with 
the fight in a spirit of prevailing despondency 
and pessimism. But so long as the world 
has vividly before it the memory of Jesus, 
and of his irrepressible confidence and hope- 
fulness through days of evil fortune, and so 
long as it has with it in every generation his 
followers, of a like spirit of indomitable 
good cheer, it will refuse to take the mere 
acceptance of the inevitable as an adequate 
discharge of life's obligation. There must 
be a better success than this. It is victory 
that men want — the victory of a self- 
possession undaunted and expectant in the 
face of every problem and disappointment 
that the world can yield. 



6 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

On every side of us, in numbers past 
counting, are the men and women who have 
felt the truth of these things and who are 
fighting the long, arduous fight of life. They 
have come to the point where the freshness of 
early hopes is gone and where the tide runs 
swiftest against them, where cares and fears 
multiply as life's resources dwindle. They 
look about them wistfully for help — fresh 
help for needs more insistent and perplexities 
more insidious than of old. Where is one 
to look in this critical doubting age for any 
adequate reassurance or promise of victory? 
Our answer is based not only on the accumu- 
lated experience of thoughtful men for ages 
past, but, what is even more convincing, upon 
our own experience through these latest 
years that belong to us. Our only chance of 
winning through successfully is by the way 
that Jesus found sufficient, so long ago — the 
way of faith in God. His faith, his teaching 
and his spirit still afi*ord the only way to 
such an undiscourageable optimism as was 
his. As was said of certain poor folk long 
before the day of Jesus' testing, " They 
looked unto him and were radiant, and their 
faces were not ashamed." It is the sight of 
God that still illumines life's dark places, 
and gives courage for energetic service. 
The misgivings and questionings of a critical 
age, no less than the slings and arrows of 



Life's Need of Faith 



outrageous fortune, may be met in quiet 
peace if only one believes that Jesus Christ 
was sent of God that we might know the 
truth. 

The creeds and institutions in which the 
church has embodied its faith are very old; 
they bear the marks of centuries of discus- 
sion and elaboration, and many in our day 
tend to shrink away from them just because 
of their venerable complexity. But faith 
itself is young and simple and more deeply 
intrenched in human experience than it has 
ever been. And it is this fresh living faith, 
new-born out of the needs and aspirations of 
our own generation, that will lead us through 
the entanglements of our sophisticated age, 
clear through, to the day when some may 
even hope to hear the words, " Blessed are 
they that have not seen and yet have be- 
Heved." 



CHAPTER II 
The Appeal of Middle Age 

WHAT has middle age to do with the fight 
for faith ? Is there anything about this 
period of life that entitles it to be heard for 
itself, as though it had a spiritual experience 
peculiarly its own? Is its faith in any wise 
different from that of youth or old age, so 
that it has a message of special savor axid 
pertinence for those who have reached the 
early afternoon of the long day of work? 
It is only necessary to ask the question in 
this form for the answer to suggest itself. 
Just because it is the time in life when work 
bears heaviest, when the freshness of morn- 
ing has gone and the rest of evening is not in 
sight, middle age has its own temptations 
and its own triumphs, out of which there may 
well come a message, to be won out of no 
other conditions, timely and heartening for 
those whose sense of need deepens with each 
year. 

As for old age, it seems as a rule to have 
come out into quieter waters than those 
with which most of us are familiar, as though 
the middle passage were over and one had 
come again under the lee of the land — the 
land of the other shore. Assuredly old age 



The Appeal of Middle Age 9 

has its consolations, even though we feel 
the pathos of its infirmities and its frequent 
loneliness. Not only so, but it has almost a 
literature of its own, froin the days of Cicero 
down. Many have spoken for its encourage- 
ment, and not a few have voiced its triumphs 
and its visions, since the time of John the 
Aged. 

As for early manhood, never has it been so 
true as today that " youth will be served." 
Much of the best of our religious literature is 
written for the special needs of college men 
and women, or for those at least who are still 
in the student period, when they are facing 
for the first time the critical problems so 
characteristic of our day. There is no audi- 
ence so attractive as is this. Thoughtful, 
eager, responsive, it demands the very best 
that our generation can afford; and it is no 
wonder that the ablest writers and thinkers 
of our time are being largely drawn upon to 
.meet the needs of this plastic and appealing 
body of hearers. There is no doubt that the 
needs and aspirations of life at the spring, 
when it is fresh and hopeful and full of vigor 
and determination, will always command the 
first place in our attention. Always it will 
have abundance of spokesmen and interpre- 
ters, of teachers and helpers and champions, 
by virtue of its unfailing and irresistible 
appeal. 



10 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

But middle age! Is it not something like 
that unattractive desert of boyhood between 
the ages of ten and fifteen years, when the 
early attractiveness has faded out and the 
maturer dignities of young manhood have 
not appeared? Men and women of fifty are 
not supposed to have much to say about the 
doubts and temptations of which they spoke 
so freely, and to sympathetic listeners, thirty 
years before. Indeed, if they spoke of them, 
they would be hard put to find an audience. 
They are supposed to have come through the 
period of storm and stress long ago, and to be 
engrossed now with their work. They are 
interesting only as they are earning money, 
or managing affairs, or caring for their 
households. It is taken for granted that 
they are practical men and women, too busy 
with the serious concerns of life to have 
either taste or leisure for indulging in the 
spiritual misgivings or the anxious heart- 
searchings that seem natural enough for the 
young girl or the lad standing at life's 
threshold. 

Alas for us who have reached or passed the 
halfway mark on life's journey! We are 
supposed to be too sensible and too strong to 
have much need of counsel, still less of help 
or comfort. We are the helpers of others. 
That we should still be having a struggle for 
our own soul's life, that we should still be 



The Appeal of Middle Age 11 

panting for a freer air in which we may- 
breathe more joyously, seems a trifle absurd. 
It is not to be expected. In any case middle 
age is not interesting to others. We are too 
old — or else not old enough. We are out 
in the hard glare of early afternoon, when the 
realities of things as they are stand out with 
merciless distinctness. The long shadows 
of the morning, or the veiling indistinctness of 
approaching dusk, are quite wanting. That 
we, too, should be living in the half-lights, 
wistfully anxious for clearer vision, full of 
hopes and fears we dare not utter but which 
are more pathetically eager than when we 
were young and strong, that temptations 
bafilingly new and unexpected should be as- 
sailing us, or that we, at middle age, whom 
our boys and girls think to be so stodgily 
going on our old-fashioned way of stifi'ened 
habits and beliefs, are still fighting the old 
battle for an honest and courageous day's 
living and for faith enough to keep on cheer- 
ily from one day's sunset to the next — 
who would suspect this to be true.^ Who 
but a middle-aged man or woman, who knows 
that it is so, who is living in the very heart 
of such a fight, and who finds that maturity 
does not necessarily mean security any more 
than silence signifies satisfaction ? 

If we are silent about our doubts it is 
because it gives us pain to think of them. 



12 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

rather than a certain complacency that we 
once felt, so long ago, when it was an agreea- 
ble exercise to discuss the great problems of 
life and death. If it is not agreeable now, 
perhaps it is because our happiness is too 
vitally concerned. Faith is more precious 
than it was in the days when it did not have to 
be hardly earned. To be sure, we are more 
hard-headed and less sentimental than once 
we were. We are expected to take our dis- 
illusionments with the satisfaction that comes 
with widening knowledge. But it is not all 
gain, especially if we fear that even the vision 
splendid begins " to die away, and fade into 
the light of common day." 

One is reminded of that pathetic verse of 
Thomas Hood's, that must have had a 
secret stab for innumerable hearts of whom it 
would never have been suspected: 

I remember, I remember 

The fir-trees dark and high; 

I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky. 

It was a childish ignorance, 

But now 'tis little joy 

To know Tm farther off from heaven 

Than when I was a boy. 

Thirty years of competitive struggle with 
a selfish world of men, half a lifetime of 
getting and spending, soon and late, in order 
to keep up appearances, do not tend of them- 



The Appeal of Middle Age 13 

selves to bring heaven nearer, or to make faith 
shine more brightly than when we were 
young. And to most men it is no joy to feel 
that spiritual realities are growing dim, or to 
realize, as did Darwin, that some of the 
nobler capacities of the soul are growing dull 
and unresponsive through the mere attrition 
of absorbing work. 

Depend upon it, middle age has also its 
trial of storm and stress to struggle through, 
as surely as the passionate years of stormy 
youth. And such faith as it holds or wins is 
the more significant and very precious. 
It may well make special claim for a thought- 
ful hearing and consideration. Whatever 
limitations it may have, it has at least the 
quality of reality. It is no longer the faith 
of inheritance, or of early education, or of 
inexperience. It is not based upon any ex- 
ternal authority, but upon experience of 
life and its discipline, and of God and his 
mercies. It has been won out of conflict, in 
the face of a legion of hostile circumstances, 
within and without. Probably it is not as 
complete and symmetrical as the faith 
we had in earlier years, but it has been tested 
at all points and has been found to bear the 
strain of life. We can rest upon it even in 
the dark and cloudy day, not because others 
have told us that it is good, but because we 
have wrestled for it through many days and 



14 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

nights of need, and God has actually come 
near us through its aid. 

It should be clearly understood that in 
speaking of the faith of middle age we do not 
mean theological faith alone — the articles 
of a man's creed — though doubtless these 
are at the heart of any hopeful outlook upon 
life. We are speaking of something broader 
and more inclusive than that, something even 
more precious and divine. We mean the 
whole attitude of the soul toward God and 
his world, that is like that of Jesus in its 
calm trust in the goodness and power of the 
Almighty. Faith is the opposite of fear. 
It stands for an undiscourageable optimism 
in the face of a world that is full of inexplica- 
ble pain and evil. It means the unshakable 
assurance that God is good, that his thoughts 
and plans for men are those of love, and that 
his resources of power and grace are such as 
will ultimately bring these plans to pass in 
spite of all our ignorance and infirmity. 
Fear means doubt and uncertainty and 
pessimism; it paralyzes the very springs 
of life. Faith is inseparable from joy and 
expectancy and service, and knits up our 
flagging resolution to ever new effort and 
determination. 

So then, the faith of a middle-aged man, 
built up slowly out of years of baffling ex- 
perience, of innumerable perplexities and 



The Appeal of Middle Age 15 

disappointments, is something deeper and 
more significant than the mere acceptance of 
certain great doctrines regarding God and the 
soul. It is the victory of the spirit over the 
whole blighting power of doubt. It is the 
triumph of a child of God over all those 
insidious enemies who would persuade him 
that he is not a child of God at all, and that 
the warring world of men, of which for a 
brief moment he is a part, is not and never 
can be a kingdom of divine love. It is a 
wonderful thing to come through all the 
warping strains of life among men with an 
unquenchable confidence that God is present 
in his world and at our side, and that his 
righteousness and love are the invincible 
powers that lie behind all the seething chaos 
of human weakness and social wrong. It 
does not imply a confidence in one's own 
future only, but in that of the far-stretching 
Kingdom of God. And on the other hand 
it is not a trust in the final victory of that 
Kingdom alone, but in the joyful outcome of 
our own brief life-career, as of infinite worth 
to the Father of the household. 

There are not many of us who do not feel, 
at some time in the long years, the deadly 
influence of the cynical skepticism that is 
ever about us like an atmosphere, in litera- 
ture and in society. There is too often a 
half-stifled echo in our own hearts to those 



16 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

mocking words that have come down through 
the centuries: 

We are no other than a moving row 
Of magic Shadow-shapes that come and go 
Round with this Sun-illumin'd lantern, held 
In Midnight by the Master of the show. 

And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, 
Whereunder, crawling, coop'd, we live and die, 
Lift not your hands to It for help — for It 
As impotently rolls as you or I. 

It only needs an overwhelming experience 
of sorrow In our own lives, some sudden and 
unexpected reversal of the tide of prosperity 
that we had come to take for granted, for 
these challenging denials — so powerless to 
disturb us when the sun shines brightly — 
to become a cruel menace to our peace. 

Faith Is the victory even over these. It Is 
the characteristic of middle age to have passed 
In and out of the shadow perhaps once and 
again; to have confronted these assailing 
fears in times of depression or weakness when 
they were at their worst, and even so, In 
spite of all, to have found the simple faith of 
Jesus as a rock beneath the feet, on which 
there was sure standing when many things 
seemed likely to be swept away. The faith 
of middle life means the victory of the soul 
over all such powers of fear and death as lurk 
in doubts like these. Not complete victory 
as yet — there may still be quite unsuspected 



The Appeal of Middle Age 17 

dangers to be passed through — but at the 
flood-tide of life's cares, when the world 
presses in relentlessly day by day, it means 
the peace of the disciple of Jesus, sharing 
with his great Elder Brother the assurance of 
a Father's love. 



CHAPTER III 
The Years of Attrition 

OXE of the cleverest essays that have ap- 
peared in recent years is that by Samuel 
Crothers on the '' School for Polite Unlearn- 
ing." It genially depicts the school whose 
aim — in view of certain regrettable qualities 
in modern education — is not to add to the 
store of its pupils' mental possessions, but to 
disburden them of a store of laboriously ac- 
quired information and relieve them early of 
the useless excess of opinions and beliefs 
that cannot hope to withstand the test 
of time. We are all familiar with the 
numberless institutions, great and small, 
whose laudable purpose is to store the minds 
of the rising generation with facts of every 
kind. But surely there is need, here and 
there, after years of hasty and careless 
stuffing with the ideas of many men, of a 
sort of post-graduate course that shall gently 
relieve us of all our fancied knowledge of 
the things that are not so — of all our 
blunders and prejudices and misconceptions, 
all our incredulities and assumptions, that 
would impair our judgment and lessen our 
influence through life. 

This " School for Polite Unlearning " is a 

18 



The Years of Attrition 19 

parable of the period of these last forty years, 
through which we of middle age have been 
passing. If ever unwilling students were 
forced to enter on an apparently unending 
course of instruction in the art of unlearning, 
even of beliefs and acquisitions most highly 
prized, it has been in the case of the men 
and women of today who came from the 
typical homes of a generation now past; 
not those most cultured or most highly 
intellectual, but the ordinary God-fearing 
homes of the common people, where religion 
was honestly regarded as the most vital 
concern in life. Such homes were in those 
days even less likely than now to be in 
sympathetic touch with the latest phases of 
religious thought in the world at large, yet 
they were and are the bulwarks of what is 
best and strongest in our Christian civiliza- 
tion. You will still find them by the tens of 
thousands, especially through the South and 
West, almost untouched in their religious 
thinking by the modern point of view. Their 
sons and daughters are in the universities, 
adjusting themselves to the intellectual move- 
ments of the day, but the parents are still 
living in a world of ideas to which those who 
have once tasted of modern scholarship never 
can return. Here is the pathetic tragedy 
that is still going on in homes rich and 
poor all about us, as all are aware who 



20 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

know at first hand what the lives of the 
people are. 

But the young people today are none 
of them wholly unprepared, on leaving 
home, to meet the modern point of view. 
It is in the atmosphere we breathe today, 
even for children; and they are somehow 
forewarned of what awaits them and are 
prepared to make the intellectual transition 
with a minimum of mental disturbance. 
In most cases they even seem to take it for 
granted that their home training was out of 
date, and as a matter of course is to be super- 
seded by the more scientific attitude of the 
educated man. 

Not so was it when we were young. 
For hundreds of years our forbears, in all 
their religious thinking, had rested un- 
hesitatingly upon certain religious principles 
which for them had never been seriously 
contested, save by those who were more or 
less open enemies of the faith. They had 
not even a mind to inquire whether these 
inherited assumptions should be challenged. 
There was something irreverent and perilous 
about giving any entertainment to serious 
questioning of traditional views, which bore 
for them the sacredness of the inspired word 
on whose teachings they were thought to be 
founded. 

Most clearly was this so in the case of the 



The Years of Attrition 21 

Bible itself, and that which pertained to it. 
So long had men been used, for example, to 
look at the date 4004 B.C- as the year of the 
creation of the world, that it did not even 
occur to them to be restive under that singu- 
lar assertion. The use of proof texts, chosen 
at random from any section of the Bible as 
conclusive for the settlement of moral and 
spiritual problems, was so habitual, so venera- 
ble in its historical indorsement, that it 
seemed to place beyond argument the equal 
authority of every writing within the Canon. 
To admit a human element in any portion 
of the long record, or to suggest, for example, 
that certain arguments of Paul's owed their 
curious inconclusiveness for modern minds 
to his rabbinic training, was to be guilty of a 
kind of unbelief that was both audacious 
and sinful. 

It is of course true that in scholarly circles 
the writings of Kant and Schleiermacher 
and their successors had long before that day 
invaded and partially overthrown the theo- 
logical preconceptions that underlay much 
of the doctrinal teaching of the church. 
Yet there were few of us who did not start 
out with the idea that correct belief was the 
primary requisite for salvation as for church 
membership. Men in those days could still 
hear without protest the amazing words, 
made authoritative by many centuries of 



22 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

unchallenged use, '' Whosoever will be saved, 
before all things it is necessary that he hold 
th^ Catholic faith .... Which faith ex- 
cept everyone do keep whole and undefiled, 
without doubt he shall perish everlastingly." 
One does not even like to remember what 
views were commonly held as to what our 
Father proposed to do hereafter with all his 
distressed and scattered children in the wide 
world everywhere, who had never had the 
good fortune of hearing the true faith set 
forth. The religious atmosphere of the 
orthodox homes of our childhood was, on its 
intellectual side — for divine love had often 
made their sympathies outrun their creeds — 
still that of the Middle Ages. Possibly it 
even prided itself that it had not advanced 
beyond Luther or Calvin or Jonathan Ed- 
wards. 

Our modern-minded children find it hard 
to sympathize with us who have been com- 
pelled in our brief lifetime to bridge over a 
change of mental attitude toward religious 
truth that historically is only to be bridged 
by centuries. The intellectual world had 
long been preparing for it, as thoughtful 
men gradually broke away from the rigid 
scholasticism of an earlier age, but upon us 
who are the middle-aged men and women in 
the churches of today the successive demands 
for the relinquishment of old convictions, 



I 



The Years of Attrition 23 

and readjustment to wholly new conceptions, 
have been breaking like the waves of a fast- 
rising sea, until it is no wonder that the faith 
of some has been submerged altogether under 
a rising tide of doubt. 

It is not as though we had been com- 
pelled simply to unlearn certain things that no 
longer can be held as true. The change has 
been more subtle and more significant than 
this. No thoughtful man fears the influence 
upon faith of what he is convinced is truth. 
It is not as between black and white, true 
and false, that we have difiiculty in choosing. 
But the popularity of agnosticism as a 
creed, the ease of saying " I do not know '^ 
to all the age-old human hopes that lie 
beyond the ordinary methods of scientific 
research and that transcend our common 
experience, has led many to feel that con- 
victions are no longer to be expected on 
certain matters of profound spiritual con- 
cern. It does not matter that Jesus spoke 
regarding them with a sublime assurance. 
The influence of Jesus' words has temporarily 
been clouded by the obvious fact that science 
cannot confirm their truth, and by the as- 
sumption that, as science has no clear de- 
liverance to offer, it is necessary for cautious 
thinkers to hold them as unproved. 

Of course there is a manifest seduction in 
this attitude for every lazy or indiff'erent 



24 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

mind, and for every one who would welcome 
an excuse for doubt on realities that would 
press in with inconvenient urgency upon his 
soul. There is nothing that is at once so 
easy and so respectable as to affirm a regret- 
ful ignorance regarding any of the great 
problems of human responsibility and divine 
love. It does not seem active disbelief, which 
might be reprehensible, but merely a state of 
intellectual suspension — the refusal to af- 
firm. Yet it is sufficient to involve all the 
great realities of life and death in a nebula 
of uncertainty that leaves them powerless to 
control. 

There are none of us who have not felt 
the chilling influence of this omnipresent 
attitude of doubt — the willingness to leave 
undetermined and unanswered the supreme 
questions that Jesus set himself to answer, 
in words and deeds of comfort that his gospel 
has continued to repeat, for the joy and in- 
spiration of humanity, through eighteen 
hundred years. The modern spirit urges us, 
if not to unlearn them, at least to hold them 
as beyond the reach of proof and therefore 
unessential for human living. 

We cannot be too often reminded, more- 
over, that from within the church itself 
come indirect support and excuse for such 
an attitude of non-conviction as to truths 
that once were held as the dearest possessions 



I 



The Years of Attrition 25 

of the soul. The prevailing note in the relig- 
ious experience of our times is, of course, 
its reawakening to the social consciousness — 
its profound recognition of the sociological 
bearings of the Christian gospel. Christian 
men today are deeply preoccupied with this 
social message that for so long a time has been 
obscured to our inestimable loss. The church 
is busy everywhere with the thoughts and 
plans and activities to which this awakening 
has given rise. Its insistence now is not 
upon belief, but upon action. And just be- 
cause of its preoccupation with obligations 
and duties too long neglected, it is contented 
to relegate to one side, for the time being, 
certain momentous matters of faith that 
are in fact the very foundation of the new 
social structure it would build. It is not 
preaching about them because it is not 
thinking about them. It is preaching and 
thinking about their social implications. 
It does not mean to disregard them, still less 
to deny them, but for a time they have been 
crowded out of sight, and it is easy for man;^ 
to hold a non-committal attitude regarding 
them, as though in a stirring age like this 
they were not of practical importance. Our 
fathers put them first — by an immeasurable 
precedence. But we have come, not to deny 
that they are first, but to lose any clear sight 
of them and any ardent loyalty in their 



26 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

support, simply because we are so busy 
gathering the harvest that they alone make 
possible. 

Nor is it the attrition of new ideas alone 
under which the sharply defined beliefs of 
our early years have lost something of their 
satisfying clearness. The very experience 
of life itself has been disconcerting to the 
simple philosophy of Christian character with 
which we started out. Our very acquain- 
tance with men — our knowledge of human 
nature — has softened, as with charity and 
humility, our easy classification of mankind 
into the saved and unsaved, according as 
they accepted or not the historic doctrines 
concerning Jesus Christ. We were taught 
to believe — at least we did believe — that if 
a man were a professing Christian, firmly 
holding to the doctrines of the true faith, he 
was thereby evidenced to be a child of 
God. But as years went by, and we came 
to know men and women of many different 
types of thought and training, painful and 
multiplied perplexities arose, especially as 
we considered the meaning of the words 
" By their fruits ye shall know them." 

We found that the most strenuous ortho- 
doxy sometimes coexisted with harsh and 
bitter tempers, and even with business habits 
that were mean or habitually untrustworthy. 
While again, those who seemed to have no 



The Years of Attrition 27 

clear hold on the great doctrines that have re- 
deemed the world, and who even made no 
profession of Christian faith, showed forth 
in their humble self-forgetting love of God 
and man the very temper of the children of 
the household. Again and again have we 
watched with something like dismay the 
collapse into moral ruin of one who has held 
a position of leadership in the church, while 
maintaining secretly for years a life of con- 
scious duplicity; and on the other hand, how 
often has our complacency been rebuked by 
finding the divinely nurtured flowers of 
faithfulness to duty and trust amid the dark- 
ness, in those whose very want of illumination 
would once have seemed to us a mark of 
guilt that shut them out from God. The 
elaborate discriminations of earlier church 
teaching have somehow grown to seem artifi- 
cial and unconvincing by the side of the sim- 
ple statement of the apostle John, " He that 
loveth is born of God and knoweth him." 

It is painful to reflect that the troubles of 
life have also had their part in wearing away 
the very faith by which trouble may be 
overcome. With some of us, the jarring, 
numbing effect of sorrow has had its part in 
breaking down all easy, untested confidence 
in the love of God. Pain of body or mind, 
or the mere heart-ache of loneliness, can make 
the world a lonely place indeed by removing 



28 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

God's face far away. The sense of unfair- 
ness, of unmerited defeat or wrong, withers 
away for some the quiet trust they once 
thought their secure possession. And what 
shall we say of the inundation of fears and 
griefs that has beset so many in these days of 
the Great War, with its devastation of count- 
less lives and homes ? Life in its later stages 
brings unexpected strains and wrenches even 
to mature experience, leading men and women 
to relinquish as unproven or ill-founded hopes 
that earlier seemed a sure source of consola- 
tion. 

All these give but a suggestion of the 
never-ending stream of influences that has 
been at work upon us through the decades, 
remolding our very habits of thought and 
always moving us a little farther off from the 
calmly accepted tradition of the past in 
which our fathers seemed to rest so con- 
tentedly, once they had settled for themselves 
the primary question of their personal sub- 
mission to God's will. We have reached the 
point where the very honesty of our purpose 
and the reality of our search for truth seem 
to lead us, not to a contented acquiescence 
in the venerable " deposit of faith " that has 
come down to us through the centuries, but 
to a torturing uncertainty as to how much we 
may — not must — believe. We have un- 
learned so much, under a compulsion beyond 



The Years of Attrition 29 

all possibility of resistance in spite of years of 
inward protest, that the whole structure of 
our faith seems shaken, and we sometimes 
wonder whether, if so much has gone, there is 
any adequate security for the permanence 
of what remains. The process of change has 
been no welcome unloading of inconvenient 
or unpopular opinions, but a sore travail of 
spirit, as we sought on the one hand to keep 
faith with God who bids us to be honest above 
all, and yet to keep firm hold on that sublime 
trust in the gospel of his love that carried 
our parents fearlessly through their long day 
of testing to a triumphant end. But to the 
upright there ariseth light in the darkness. 



CHAPTER IV 

Faith's Inner Citadel 

TN the siege of Delhi, during the Sepoy 
•*• rebelHon, when the British troops were 
perched on the ridge outside the city through 
the long heart-breaking summer, the chief 
fear of those who knew the situation best 
was that the Sepoys would throw up a secon- 
dary line of earthworks behind the exposed 
wall, so that when at last the wall was 
breached and the storming party entered, 
they would merely find themselves con- 
fronted by a second fortification, stronger 
than the first, the city still lying impregnable 
within. The fear was not realized; but 
times without number, from the siege of 
Jerusalem down, this is the surprise that has 
awaited the triumphant besiegers in what they 
thought to be their hour of victory — to 
find an inner circle of defense, still secure from 
their attack. 

Something similar to this has been taking 
place in our own generation, in the long series 
of assaults upon the Christian faith. The 
old defenses have slowly been giving way. 
They were ill adapted to withstand the 
methods of present-day warfare, and at 
last, to the consternation of the defenders, 

30 



Faith's Inner Citadel 31 

it has become only too evident that breaches 
have here and there been made that seem to 
imperil the whole position. But other forces 
have been at work than those that have en- 
gaged public attention. For now, at length, 
it begins to be apparent that while the time- 
honored walls of authoritative creed and 
confession and dogma, laid stone by stone 
so painstakingly through centuries of earnest 
effort, have been giving way year by year, 
until eager voices proclaim that they and all 
they sheltered are at last in ruins, an inner 
circle of defense meantime has been growing 
up, impregnable even before twentieth-cen- 
tury ingenuity of assault, sheltering still 
within it the gospel of God, without which the 
hope of the world were dead. 

It is not based upon any external authority, 
however venerable, but upon the living 
experience of God's voice in the soul, not to be 
resisted save by doing violence to the laws of 
the spirit. It centers about the revelation 
of Jesus Christ. Not primarily because any 
book proclaims him divine, nor because any 
church or council has declared his word to be 
of eternal validity, but because the heart of 
the child leaps up to meet his revelation of 
the Father and finds its own true life and 
liberty in bowing to its authority. Let any 
man earnestly consider the life and message 
of Jesus and he will find his own spiritual 



32 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 



consciousness singularly stirred and quick- 
ened. Not only does it feel the Impulse as of 
a divine appeal, but speaks itself with a new 
voice of insistence and authority. And in 
the end, to his great comfort, it will not let 
him doubt that this God — the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ — will be 
our God even until death. For in the last 
analysis we recognize that the authority of 
our own spiritual experience, speaking 
through conscience and intellect and emo- 
tion, is but the authority of the eternal God, 
whose voice it echoes. 

This is the new and inner citadel of faith. 
At least, if it is not new, it is newly dis- 
closed to us by the breaking down of the 
strongholds in which men so long had put 
their trust. It was necessary to overthrow 
the old bulwarks of arbitrary authority, on 
which the church had come so largely to rely 
as a sufficient protection, before men could 
understand how unshakably secure were 
the real defenses of the soul's inheritance. 
God's truth for the uplifting of human life 
is not such as can be undermined or over- 
thrown by any wave of intellectual enlighten- 
ment, in the nineteenth century or any other. 
If the supports of faith are weakened by the 
rising tide of knowledge, the trouble is with 
the supports and not with faith. But the 
whole effect of this rising tide, and of the 



Faith's Inner Citadel 33 

stormy and urgent experience through which 
so many have been passing in our time, is that 
the real and abiding foundations have become 
increasingly apparent. 

This inner circle of realities, centering 
about the personality of Jesus Christ, is then 
the impregnable stronghold of faith. We 
need to set ourselves to consider earnestly 
what they are — these facts that challenge 
investigation, not as shadowy doctrines of the 
past, but as realities as incontestable and 
surely as important as those of the scientific 
laboratory. It is true that they are spiritual 
phenomena, not physical; but no one in 
these days can suppose them less vitally 
related to the long process of human develop- 
ment on that account. 

It is the historic character of Jesus Christ 
that is, of course, the central fact of all. We 
know it well, and the amazing powers that 
have been found inherent in it, unaffected 
by lapse of time, as in a fragment of radium. 
It is a fact of unchallenged reality. No 
sane criticism is able to obscure its essential 
features. One might as well expect to bring 
Homer's Iliad to nought by criticism as to 
delete the abiding wonder from the story of 
the life of Jesus. Homer's Iliad stands be- 
fore us, and will stand in the thought of men 
forever, as a work of unchallenged genius. 
And so the life-experience of Jesus, as we 



34 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

read it in his words and works, stands before 
us to the ever-increasing admiration of the 
world. The wonder of it grows as the spiri- 
tual culture and insight of mankind grow more 
critically keen. It is more influential over 
men today, beyond all question, than it was 
one hundred years ago, in an age far less 
exacting and less critical; and as for the men 
and women of the first century, how far 
better are we able to judge of its unique and 
unapproachable qualities than were they, 
who knew so little of the race history of the 
soul's needs and struggles. 

It is true that biblical criticism, in the 
sifting of the New Testament records, has 
thrown doubt on many passages here and 
there — doubt that the most reverent scholar- 
ship has sometimes to admit. But when all 
has been done that searching scholarship and 
sympathetic criticism may do, the main 
outlines of the life and character and message 
of Jesus remain unaltered. There have been 
days in the last seventy-five years when men 
have dealt with the character of Jesus as 
though it had neither unity nor beauty nor 
significance, as though it were a patchwork 
of unrelated odds and ends from many hands; 
and so have stripped away far the larger part 
of the recorded words and acts that reveal the 
Man of all men, as being mere obscuring 
accretions of a later time. They have " re- 



Faith's Inner Citadel 35 

stored the original '' in such wise that what 
had been the world's supreme possession of 
beauty and of strength is left only the crude 
and disappointing effort of an amateur; 
as though a man should stand before the 
fagade of York Minster and gradually strip 
away all its exquisite ornamentation, its 
delicate tracery of arch and window and 
pinnacle, leaving only the gaunt walls, 
sufficient to uphold the roof, and assert that 
he had thus uncovered the architect's real 
conception, and that all else was but meaning- 
less addition. Yet the artist's genius still 
speaks in the superb uplifting whole, before 
which so many generations have stood in 
reverent delight. 

The great war has done this service for 
the world of biblical scholars, that it has 
enabled them to see how a certain Prussian- 
ism of method may enter even into the field 
of biblical criticism, and regardless of decisive 
ethical or spiritual considerations hack its 
way through even such sacred ground as 
Olivet and Gethsemane and Calvary, in the 
interest of an arbitrary personal theory that 
must be made to prevail, although the 
surest intuitions of the spirit are outraged in 
the process. And it may be doubted whether 
ever again there will return to plague us in 
the same degree the exquisite irrationality 
of construing the world's sublimest pos- 



36 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

session of moral power and beauty, as the 
incongruous patchwork creation of a half- 
dozen envious and fanatic Jews in the first 
and second centuries. 

In any event, it will be conceded by 
practically all observers that never has the 
figure of Jesus Christ stood out so radiantly 
clear as it does today, impressing itself 
upon the world of thought in a degree 
hitherto unequaled, by the sheer com- 
pulsion of its power and sweet reasonable- 
ness, in the face of human weakness and folly. 
The madness of war, and the wickedness of 
the individual and national pride and self- 
ishness that led up to it, have thrown into 
clearer relief than before the unapproachable 
dignity and universal validity of the spirit 
and teaching of the great Elder Brother of 
the race. In a time of barbaric cruelty, 
out of a race bigoted and passionate, with 
an almost frenzied sense of national superior- 
ity and of contempt for all lesser breeds with- 
out the law, there emerged this divinely 
human Friend of men, that even the twentieth 
century, drenched in misery, yearningly 
recognizes as its only Deliverer. Depend 
upon it, there is no phenomenon in the long 
history of men so outstandingly and unas- 
sailably clear, untouched in its essential 
features after all these years either by the 
tooth of time or by the endless obscurations of 



Faith's Inner Citadel 37 

friend and foe, as the personality of Jesus, 
about which centers the citadel of our faith. 

Here is the Man of men! We find in 
him the flower of our race, the crown of 
manhood, in which, after the long ages of 
development, life has reached its supreme 
achievement. There is in him a perfection 
of the highest powers of manhood that 
transcends all that we know of what the 
struggle for life has attained elsewhere. 
Not even yet has his power spent itself, nor 
have men yet perceived how supremely 
victorious was his brief career. 

Here, then, is the inquiry that leads 
us on to faith. How came he, out of so 
unfriendly an environment, to be victorious 
over all the hostile forces that limit men and 
hold them back from attainment of their 
highest possibilities? We of this twentieth 
century, who have grown so wise in our 
mastery of the forces of nature and of all the 
arts of living, seem little farther advanced 
in the higher life of the spirit than was 
the generation of Socrates. On every hand 
we are beset with the old, old enemies of 
moral health, from within and from without, 
that not only harass but weaken and cripple 
us, and entail such fears and regrets as de- 
stroy our peace and hold us back from the 
high estate that we can dimly perceive as 
ours by right. How comes it that out of the 



38 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

darkness of that first century there stands, in 
ever clearer light, the figure of this man who 
actually attained life as it was meant to be, 
who succeeded in overcoming the world as 
none ever have succeeded who went before 
or followed after? How does it happen 
that the highest evolution of our race, the 
most perfectly developed life of which we 
know anything in the whole universe of living 
things, should have been achieved by this 
Galilean peasant? 

Has the science of today any inquiry 
more vital than is this ? Are any of the great 
inventors, busy with high explosives and more 
efficient means of meeting death with death, 
wrestling with problems more directly re- 
lated to human welfare? Let us be sure that, 
in studying the conditions that produced a 
life like that of Jesus, we are engaged in an 
inquiry, not for the religious only or the 
piously minded, but of inexpressible concern 
for every lover of the race, who would fain 
see the joy of life at the full for all the chil- 
dren of men. From what root does moral 
victory at the highest grow? 

The answer to the inquiry is not far to 
seek. Yet let us be sure at the outset that 
our judgment is not made worthless by the 
suggestion, openly made or half-consciously 
entertained, that Jesus won a triumphant 
manhood because he was a God sojourning 



Faith's Inner Citadel 39 

on earth, victorious over human beset- 
ments by virtue of a divine birthright that 
separated him from all his fellows. We must 
give full weight to the unmistakable facts on 
which his early friends laid such stress, to 
forestall just such error. He was a man born 
of a woman, made in all things like unto his 
brethren, tempted in all points as we are, 
made perfect through suffering, learning 
obedience through the things that he suf- 
ered, and though with strong crying and 
tears yet carrying his obedience even unto 
death. The victory he won in the face of all 
life's ills was a victory of triumphant man- 
hood, and the principles by which he tri- 
umphed are eternally valid for his brethren. 

His moral victory grew out of his perfect 
adjustment to a certain realm of ideas appre- 
hended only by faith. This perfection of 
adjustment is inseparably related to his 
perfection of character. The two are as 
obviously and inseparably related as the 
break of dawn is related to the rising sun. 
This faith was the dynamic life-principle that 
gave to him a moral stature beyond that of 
all mankind beside. His courage, his gentle- 
ness, his truth, his purity, his self-possession 
in the face of fear, his inflexible faithfulness, 
and his unselfish love of men that was not 
dulled or daunted by any personal considera- 
tion, were all manifestly rooted in this sub- 



40 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

lime engagement of his soul with things un- 
seen. And the world of realities from which 
his soul drank in this unequaled strength to 
overcome is the very world which the spirit of 
our age tells us we safely may ignore as un- 
proven and unknowable — the vast realm of 
truth that gathers about the presence with 
us men of a living personal God and loving 
Father. 

The spirit of Jesus was perfectly ad- 
justed at every point to this great reality. 
He believed in God, trusted him, loved him, 
and lived only to do his will. As he said 
explicitly of himself, he did not speak his 
own words, or do his own works, or seek 
his own glory. He was a man under the 
welcome constraint of a great affection. 
Day by day he was in communication with 
another, whose perfect instrument he sought 
to be, in death as well as life. His whole 
life and character were but the expression of 
this all-pervasive, all-controlling faith and 
purpose. Jesus was what he was because his 
whole being was controlled and shaped by 
this sensitive adjustment of all his powers 
to the God in whom he trusted. This 
cannot be denied. It is as clear as the light. 
It is a fact in the moral world upon which we 
may build as securely as we build on the fact 
of gravitation. The supreme development 
in all the universe of organic life — the 



Faith's Inner Citadel 41 

personality of Jesus — grew out of his ad- 
justment to a single group of formative ideas 
— the fact of God, and of such a God as his 
Father, Here, then, is the citadel of our 
own faith, so beset with assailing forces — 
the fact of the overcoming life of Jesus as the 
product of faith in God. 

It is one of the fundamental laws of 
development, with which present-day science 
has made us all familiar, that life is dependent 
on the adjustment of inner to outer relations, 
and is proportioned in its fulness to the 
perfection of this relation with its actual 
environment. If the adjustment is imperfect, 
or if for any reason it is adapted to other 
than the actually prevailing environment, 
the life is stunted or destroyed. But the 
supreme manifestation of life of which we 
have any knowledge, the majestic life of 
Jesus Christ, was developed through its 
perfect adjustment to a realm of ideas con- 
cerning God that Jesus pronounced the 
fundamental realities of life. If they were 
not realities, if he was mistaken in his faith, 
if they were but delusions that yet built him 
up to such spiritual stature, then indeed we 
are confronted by a miracle, and not a 
beneficent miracle, but one that reduces to 
chaos the ordered universe of law. For 
here is a violent interruption of the law that 
elsewhere is universally applicable to living 



42 Faith of a IMiddle-Aged Man 

things. We have the highest development 
proceeding from a mistaken adjustment to a 
non-existent order. There was a marvelously 
complete adaptation, but it was pathetically 
groping after a sustaining environment that 
had no existence save in an overwrought 
imagination. Yet out of this mocking delu- 
sion, this misdirected application of life- 
energy, grew the consummate perfection of 
human capacities that we see in the character 
of Jesus. 

The enormity of the contradiction would 
not be so great if it had resulted only in a 
life that in its own day appeared successful, 
but that presently, as time passed, revealed 
the specious unreality of its excellence and 
betrayed the deceit upon reason from which 
it sprang. But just the opposite has hap- 
pened. The centuries have only increased 
men's wonder at the inexhaustible richness 
of Jesus' personality. Its worth and genuine- 
ness have been subjected to every test that 
the wit of man could devise, whether in love 
or hate. And never has it stood so strong in 
the divine simplicity of its power as at this 
time. And the tortured nations confess 
that the principles by which it grew so great 
are the only principles by which the abundant 
life may return to society today. 

So we believe that the pre-eminence of 
Jesus is not a blunder and a miracle of 



Faith's Inner Citadel 43 

mocking chance, to set at naught the world 
of cause and effect, and disorder the realm of 
ordered law. It was an actual environment 
of reality to which his whole being was ad- 
justed, in his walk with an unseen God. To 
know his will, to think his thoughts, to do his 
pleasure, to walk with him by day and night, 
was not the dream of a visionary, it was 
life's supreme functioning. It was the sub- 
limest reality that is given men to experi- 
ence. It carried a dynamic current of 
immeasurable potency. And in the life of 
Jesus — Galilean peasant though he was — 
we of the twentieth century see the revela- 
tion of the eternal truth. What Jesus be- 
lieved and experienced and lived was true. 
It was no seductive falsehood that made him 
the Man among men, but the blessed reality 
that often seems to us too good to be true. 
It was the truth of an Almighty Father, as 
compassionate, as loving, as devoted to the 
uplifting of downtrodden men and women, 
as was Jesus himself — of a God who has 
made us for himself, and for whom we hunger, 
in the dark or in the light, as inevitably as 
a child hungers for its parents. 

This is the faith of Jesus Christ, that 
made him what he was. And because we 
cannot but believe in him, we cannot do other 
than commit ourselves unreservedly to his 
faith in God. 



CHAPTER V 

The Life as a Witness to the Truth 

TN the reminiscences of her girlhood, given 
^ in the autobiography of Frances Power 
Cobbe, is the following pathetic passage: 

Then ensued four years on which I look back as 
pitiful in the extreme. In complete mental solitude 
and great ignorance I found myself facing all the dread 
problems of human existence. For a long time my 
intense desire to remain a Christian predominated, 
and brought me back from each return to scepticism 
in a passion of repentance and prayer to Christ to take 
my life or my reason sooner than allow me to stray 
from the fold. In those days no such thing was heard 
of as " broad " interpretations of Scripture doctrines. 
To be a Christian then was to believe implicitly in 
the verbal inspiration of every word of the Bible, and 
to adore Christ as " very God of very God." Had 
anything like modern theories . . . been known to me 
at this crisis of my life, it is possible that the whole 
course of my spiritual history would have been different. 
But Evangelical Christianity in 1840 presented itself 
as a thing to be taken whole or rejected wholly. 

As time went on, I saw all that had made to me the 
supreme glory and joy of life fade out of it. In the 
summer after my twentieth birthday, I had reached 
the end of the long struggle. It left me with something 
as nearly like a tabula rasa of faith as can well be im- 
agined. I definitely disbelieved in human immortality 
and in a supernatural revelation. 

It is impossible to read such a passage 
without sadness and deep sympathy — sym- 
pathy for the young girl striving to be 

44 



Life as a Witness to Truth 45 

honest above all, even at the cost of that 
which made life sweet, and sadness that her 
experience should be typical of that of tens of 
thousands of the noblest spirits, from her 
day till now. You may meet women of 
middle age today in almost any cultured 
circle, who, if they chose to speak on a buried 
chapter in their lives, could repeat almost 
word for word this sorrowful confession of the 
wrecking of a once precious faith. And 
no thoughtful man can have lived out 
half his life without having had occasion, 
over and again, to reflect on the tragedy of 
attempting to coerce faith in a completed 
system of authoritative doctrine. 

It is the needlessness of it all that most 
impresses one. If only these troubled in- 
quirers could have realized that the supreme 
object of faith is the revelation brought by 
Jesus Christ and witnessed by the voice of 
God in our own souls; that all other questions 
are of necessity subsidiary and by compari- 
son even unimportant! They are the vic- 
tims of a system of teaching that made the 
size of the ark, or the righteousness of orien- 
tal massacres, as necessary an object of 
belief as the words of Jesus on purity or 
forgiveness. They did not know that the 
teaching and example of Jesus might be 
trusted utterly, even though they should be 
inconsistent with Old Testament impreca- 



46 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

tions upon one's enemies. The defenses of 
their faith were no stronger than their weak- 
est link, and indeed, it was on these weakest 
links that their attention became almost 
wholly centered. The primacy of Jesus and 
the supreme authority of his words were lost 
sight of in the dust of old controversies, and 
the attention of these seekers after truth was 
diverted to a multitude of irritating prob- 
lems of minor importance, amid which they 
wandered as in a spiritual wilderness, until 
they had hopelessly lost sight of Him who is 
alone the light of the world. 

We who have faced the confusing changes 
of the last thirty years should not suffer from 
a similar confusion! We have reached the 
day when we should see clearly that every- 
thing in the Bible is of value only as it leads 
up to and illuminates the message brought 
by Jesus Christ, in word and life. And we 
shall not go astray if we rest our entire faith 
on that foundation. It is of the utmost 
moment, however, that we should face the 
personality of Jesus with the most honest and 
earnest inquiry of which our minds are 
capable. It constitutes the central problem 
for the spiritual life, and the central fire from 
which must come all its warmth. The 
moral issues that group themselves around 
such a life of victory as that of the Man of 
Nazareth must needs be the most vital of all 



Life as a Witness to Truth 47 

issues for human thought. And we shall do 
well to carry a little farther into detail our 
present inquiry as to what his character was, 
and what its bearings are upon our faith to- 
day. Wherein lies its strange compulsion 
upon our spirits and what witness does it 
offer to the value of the total message that 
he brought.'* 

Probably most of us in our childhood 
took over our parents' estimate of Jesus, 
without special appreciation of his char- 
acter, yet with a sincere loyalty of gratitude 
because we believed he gave himself to be 
our Saviour. We believed on him as the 
one through whom alone we should be saved 
from sin and find our way to eternal life in 
the world to come. But as we have grown 
older, the years have greatly widened our 
understanding of what this present life 
means, as the field in which human char- 
acter is to be wrought out. Its temptations 
and perils, its seductive compromises, its 
wrongs and cruelties and abuses — all the 
fierceness of the struggle for justice and 
truth and mercy and love among men — 
have become for us enthrallingly real and 
vivid, so that our early anxiety to save our 
souls by believing on Jesus has grown dim 
and pale by comparison. We are so tumul- 
tuously pressed by the effort not only to keep 
our own life clean and honorable and coura- 



48 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

geous in the face of unremitting temptation, 
but to have a little part also in the fight for 
the safety and welfare of others who are 
trodden down in the struggle, that the future 
life and its tremendous issues are of necessity 
pushed somewhat into the background. 

On the other hand, the urgent need of 
moral strength, of stern integrity of char- 
acter, in the unrelenting conflict with the 
world, the flesh, and the devil, is ever more 
clear to our apprehension. Moral inade- 
quacy confronts us, not only within but on 
every side. There is need of courage and of 
unflinching loyalty to certain great causes, 
and we find timidity or indifference; we 
look for helpers of a passionate devotion 
to a high ideal, and we find self-interest or 
self-seeking breaking down their single- 
heartedness; we look for staunch friends, 
and find that they cannot be counted on in 
an emergency; we expect an unblemished 
integrity, and we have met too often with 
dishonor and duplicity. On the other hand, 
we have come to value beyond all expression 
the qualities that go to make up the true 
friends and helpers of men, the men and 
women whom we have learned to revere, 
whose unselfish sympathy with the sufferings 
of the oppressed makes them the cham- 
pions of God's poor. And we have come 
to value also the more hidden and fragrant 



Life as a Witness to Truth 49 

qualities of the spirit, that, nourished in 
secret, make it more easy for us to believe 
in God and to feel that he is not far from every 
one of us. 

As we have come through a whole genera- 
tion of such experience of human nature, 
its mingled frailty and strength, its humilia- 
tion and victory, in the endless endeavor 
after character, we have reached a point 
where, if we are in deadly earnest, we find 
ourselves turning with the whole strength of 
our being to such a leader as Jesus Christ, 
simply because he was what he was - — be- 
cause all that we most long for and most 
revere in human life today we find in him. 
Such a champion of the weak he was; such 
a friend unto death, true as a sword-blade 
under strain, to those who loved him; of 
such gallant and unswerving courage under 
hopeless odds; so gentle and so firm; so 
faithful to duty, so true to the highest, 
so unstained with earth's corruption and so 
perfect in unselfish love. 

Little did we know, as boys and girls, 
what all this meant in the story of Jesus 
— how costly such qualities are to win, 
and how hard to keep; how rare they are 
among men, but how unspeakably precious 
and comforting as we see them here and there 
reflected in lives about us. But now we 
know — that is, we faintly begin to know — 



50 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

through hard experience. At least we know 
enough to cleave to such a leader with all our 
heart and soul, because everything we most 
want in life is gathered up in him. 

We believe in him! It is not the belief 
of our childhood. Perhaps that was as 
simple and as sincere, but it was not the 
same. This is not something that we were 
taught, or that we inherited, or that the 
church has handed down in the creeds; neither 
is it a faith accepted as the means of securing 
salvation. It is a part of our spontaneous 
self-expression, in the effort to be at our best. 
It is the fruit of our own soul's travail with 
life. It is what we have been taught of God 
while the years of moral struggle have been 
going on. It is the hunger for a good fellow- 
ship so strong and masterful as actually to 
be redeeming in its influence. 

Consider, one by one, several of those 
qualities in him that made him what he 
was, and that are most evident and most 
appealing. 

We cannot think of him at all, apart 
from his sympathy for men. It is the most 
outstanding characteristic of his life. He 
went about doing good — not professionally, 
but because he could not do otherwise, car- 
ing for people as he did. His chief interest in 
life was people — the men and women whom 
he met from day to day. His interest in 



Life as a Witness to Truth 51 

them was so genuine, and his sympathy 
for their needs so warm, that he seems al- 
ways to have been followed by needy folk. 
Some of us are left very much alone — to 
our books or our business or our own con- 
cerns, whatever they are; it is taken for 
granted, justly or unjustly, that we do not 
want to be troubled by the cares of others. 
There was no danger of making that mistake 
with Jesus. His was not the greatness that 
makes solitary. Such sympathy overflowed 
from him that in all that Syrian province it 
was manifest that the common people had 
no friend like him. All sorts and conditions 
of men turned to him for sympathy and 
found it, from the babies whom their mothers 
brought for his blessing, to Pharisees and 
Roman ofl5cers, or broken-hearted souls who 
could trust none else. 

All high-minded young people of today 
are talking much of social service, and al- 
ready see themselves in coming years as 
unselfish helpers of society. But somehow, 
by the time one reaches middle age, the real 
lovers and servants of men are found to be 
very, very few, and most of them are what 
they are by contagion of this very quality in 
the life of Jesus. It is one of the great privi- 
leges of life to be in close touch with some of 
those noble souls who really love people 
for their own sake, and devote themselves 



52 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

to others' good. It humbles us and makes 
us better men even to see them at their daily 
work. Perhaps there is nothing in life more 
manifestly divine than this. We cannot help 
believing that such love is of God. We 
profoundly covet something of it for our- 
selves. All of us believe wholeheartedly 
in people of that type; we cannot but do so, 
because of its divine appeal to that in us which 
is most divine. 

But in Jesus we find this quality in its 
perfection. He was a helper of men before 
all else. He was even conscious of this 
himxself, and serenely confident that he was 
able to give help if men would but allow him 
— even the kind of help that reaches behind 
all outward symptoms of misery to the root 
of the discomfort. As he said himself to a 
crowd of village people, " Come unto me all 
ye that labor and are heavy laden and I 
will give you rest.'' 

When we were children it seemed to us 
a matter of course that Jesus should be the 
best man that ever lived, because he was 
the Son of God. But as we have grown older, 
do we not turn to a man like that with a 
great hunger both of longing and of aff'ec- 
tion? There is nothing in life more worthy, 
more beautiful, than the spirit that he had; 
and there is nothing more difficult to win, 
as we have proved. Yet still we aspire 



Life as a Witness to Truth 53 

toward it, and our utter loyalty would go 
out to such a leader. He calls us as the voice 
of God would call us. Indeed, we feel that 
his appeal to us in this respect is, of a truth, 
God's voice. 

It is a profound reassurance to find, as 
another side of Jesus' character, a quality 
of which we are almost as much in need, his 
reverence for righteousness. Nothing could 
dull his burning consciousness of the great 
issues of life and death that must be at stake 
in such a moral universe as this. He refused 
to treat men as though bread or ease or 
length of days, any or all of them, were the 
chief end of life. There was no element 
of weakness or superficiality about his 
compassion for human wretchedness. He 
was as sternly strong and wise in dealing 
with others as he was in dealing with him- 
self. When he was faint with hunger, he 
remembered that there were obligations of 
honor upon him as a child of God, greater 
than any obligation to keep himself alive 
with bread unworthily obtained. When bru- 
tal cruelty was staring him in the face, which 
he might have escaped had he consulted the 
overwhelming impulse of the moment, he 
held himself patiently submissive, in order 
that the holy will of one greater than he 
might be carried out. He involved even his 
closest friends in heart-breaking misfortune 



54 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

— as the world counts misfortune — be- 
cause he saw that in no other way could they 
so serve God's purpose, or themselves be- 
come so great. It was because he was so 
firm with himself that he could be so true to 
the needs of others. His whole life's activity 
was guided not only by a matchless sym- 
pathy for men, but by a discernment of 
life's highest ends that made his sympathy 
as righteous and uplifting as it was tender. 

With some of the humanitarians of our 
day we have the uneasy feeling that their 
heart has its way at the expense of their head. 
Their philosophy of life is superficial. They 
are passionately conscious of men's wrongs 
and sorrows, and in their eagerness to bring 
immediate relief they perceive but faintly 
certain immutable principles of social well- 
being, that cannot be ignored without disas- 
ter. If their love of men were but refined 
and guided by their sense of the holiness of 
God as the abiding spring of human welfare, 
they would be better servants of their fel- 
lows. The leaders whom we shall need in 
the work of social reconstruction after the 
world war must be men and women great 
enough to see that peace and happiness 
for the nations can come only out of unflinch- 
ing acceptance of a divine program for hu- 
manity. To be sternly true to the highest 
is even more humane than to be too com- 



Life as a Witness to Truth 55 

passionate to bear the thought of human 
suffering. 

And in all this we recognize that Jesus 
reveals the perfect leadership. He kept 
himself clean, but he felt to the depth of his 
being the terrible penalties of uncleanness 
that God's law has provided. Day by day 
he walked obediently in the way his Father 
chose; but his heart ached as he saw the 
misery that sprang up in a hundred forms 
because men refused to choose God's will. 
His pity for men went deep — far deeper 
than the surface sorrows that we find it so 
hard to look upon. His life was the very 
unfolding of compassion itself; but it was a 
compassion rooted in the eternal righteous- 
ness. 

Just because of our human weakness and 
superficiality — our readiness to put ease 
and comfort before truth and honor, both 
for ourselves and for society — we feel the 
supremacy of such a character. It is a 
revelation of what God would have us be. 
It has in it an element of appeal that is, 
again, like the appeal of God to our own 
souls. We would be what Jesus was! We 
would fain make our own the same sources of 
strength that made him great. We believe 
in the correctness of the spiritual insight 
that made him wise and strong where most 
of us are feeble and shortsighted. His way 



56 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

is the way of truth. We have seen too 
much of well-meaning but incompetent 
leadership; so that if by any means we could 
come under such a prevailing influence as 
that of Jesus, it would be what we should 
desire as life's highest inspiration. 

There is a very different quality that 
draws us to him as the years go by — his 
purity of soul. Even though we are not 
pessimistic in our judgment of human na- 
ture, yet, as our acquaintance with men in- 
creases, we come to see how fierce and un- 
relenting are the assaults of appetite and 
passion, and how scorching is the breath of 
that impurity whose moral devastation dwarfs 
even the ravages of drink. Many in our day 
do not perceive it because they make little 
effort to keep their own life clean. But just 
in proportion as one tries, as in the sight of a 
holy God, to keep his own heart and imagina- 
tion unstained with evil, and still more as 
he joins in the struggle to make a clean life 
possible for the poor, or for the boys and 
girls of the coming generation, or for the 
soldiers in our camps, does he feel the suprem- 
acy and the wonder of such a character as 
Jesus, and the aching need for such an ex- 
ample and for such leadership before the 
eyes of men. 

We are poisoned by the very atmosphere 
we breathe. But such was the self-control of 



Life as a Witness to Truth 57 

Jesus that he held himself in a heavenly 
atmosphere, where the insidious miasma of 
the coarse ideals of his time could not affect 
him. We feel that even if the secret and 
fugitive desires of his heart had been sud- 
denly exposed — the test no soul of man would 
willingly endure — he would have been un- 
ashamed. In the story of his life there is not 
a word that parades his virtue in this regard; 
and yet, as one reads that story thoughtfully, 
he recognizes not only how Jesus guarded 
his own heart so that he could see God, but 
how his strength was like the shadow of a 
great rock to the frail, sin-stained lives that 
turned to him for refuge as to the untempted 
God himself. 

As we freely face Jesus Christ, and medi- 
tate upon this his example and his appeal, we 
feel that the eternal righteousness appeals 
to us through him. The fiction and drama 
of our day leave us fairly bewildered as to 
what is possible or even desirable for present- 
day society in the way of heroic self-restraint 
for noble ends. But a half-hour's associa- 
tion with the personality of Jesus lifts us 
up to where we see, as by a divine illumina- 
tion, what knightliness of unstained fidelity 
is the true estate of all the sons and daughters 
of God on earth. Do we not then turn to 
him with all the strength of our manhood if 
we are honest in the good fight .'^ Would we 



58 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

not cleave to such a one with all our heart 
because he makes us see clearly what none 
other can make us see? The chiefest hope 
for the renovation of the low standards of 
society today is in the moral illumination and 
moral power that radiate from his personality. 
How many a virtuous man or woman 
has been cold and hard as the very law 
itself toward those who have lost hold on 
virtue and joy together. They have thought 
to emphasize their own correctness by sever- 
ity to the weaknesses of others. But this 
man of spotless soul, who loathed the can- 
cerous evil that defiled the image of the Father 
in the children, was yet the very friend of 
sinners. We are drawn to him by the whole 
strength of our heart's affection, because he 
was so divinely gentle with the weak. We 
love him for his treatment of those whom 
society affected to abhor. They carried the 
marks of their degradation. Evil associa- 
tions had stamped them with the odious 
vulgarity of commonplace vice. Jesus' own 
mother would have shrunk from them in- 
stinctively. He did not even shrink from 
them. The fire of his love and sympathy 
burned out his natural repugnance. He 
brought the very love of God visibly to their 
understandings, though without trace of 
compromise with their guilt. We rejoice 
to think that the gentleness he showed w^s 



Life as a Witness to Truth 59 

the gentleness of the holy God toward those 
distressed and scattered sheep whom he 
would fain recall. We cannot equal it, 
but we can reverence it in him, and almost 
would this trait alone in the character of 
Jesus bind us to him as his disciples. 

We pause for a moment upon his courage. 
As the tide of life's anxieties and cares comes 
flooding in upon us with the years, as we see 
how many lives about us are weakened in 
their later stages by timidity, or discourage- 
ment, or actual fear, we appreciate more and 
more the calm, strong self-possession of 
Jesus in the presence of multiplied disap- 
pointment. He realized in his brief career 
the utmost use of his capacities, because to 
each day's task he brought a freshness of 
determination and hopefulness utterly un- 
daunted by adverse conditions. The ideals 
of character and service that he had before 
him were not dulled or made inoperative by 
dejection or irresolution, but were absolutely 
efficient in the control of his will. How well 
we know the type of character that, like 
Amiel's, is full of high aspirations, but yet 
goes through life crippled and ineffective to 
the end, for sheer want of the needful courage 
to put them into practice. 

Jesus was all that a flawless courage 
could have made him. He went his way 
and spoke his message as freely, as whole- 



60 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

heartedly, as though he were not bringing 
down upon his head an avalanche of hatred, 
from all the vested interests of his time. 
He feared neither church nor state, even 
though they were to crush him at the last. 
He could not be shaken by the favor or dis- 
favor of the crowd, nor made despondent by 
the fickleness of inconstant followers. There 
was in him that vital sense of power, that 
certainty of ultimate victory, that made 
him invulnerable to any of the paralyzing 
fears and anxieties that have dragged down 
so many gallant spirits in the fight for better 
things. Even when all seemed lost, and he 
knew that his enemies would be gloating 
over his sufferings before the week was out, 
he was calmly forgetful of himself in his 
loving ministry to his friends; the fear of 
death itself could not shake the confidence 
with which he bequeathed his peace and joy 
to his disciples. 

Every one of us is conscious that this is 
what life ought to be; that every soul of 
man should have such undiscourageable 
purpose, such hope and cheer, invincible in 
the face of misfortune, as to .make life sweet 
and strong in spite of assailing fear. That 
would be life at its best — not a bovine con- 
tentment with unbroken ease, but a superb 
strength of self-possession to meet and over- 
come all enemies. Jesus alone realized it in 



Life as a Witness to Truth 61 

its completeness. He could not know the 
foreboding dread of any evil future, because 
his whole being was perfectly gathered up 
in the will to do his Father's will, and in the 
confidence that that will could lead only to 
joy, even though sorrow met him on the 
way. If only we, too, could so far learn 
his spirit as to meet each day with new-born 
courage for the day's adventure! Only this, 
we are persuaded, is life as it was meant to 
be. 



CHAPTER VI 
The Personality of Jesus 

WE need to touch on only a single 
further quality of Jesus, that can 
hardly be overlooked in any estimate of the 
man — his loyalty to truth. Confucius has 
much to say of sincerity. Yet the influence 
of his teaching has been to produce a type 
of moral development, in the state and in 
society, in which insincerity seems to have 
been raised almost to the nth power. The 
influence of Jesus' character, after so long a 
time, is such that no man can drink deeply 
of his spirit and not fear a lie, or any sham or 
way of imposture. The official representa- 
tives of his religion, and his professed fol- 
lowers, have often enough feared the truth 
and tried to hold it at a distance. But it 
needs little knowledge of Jesus' life to see 
how false they were to his spirit. 

His closest personal friend said that truth 
came by Jesus Christ — such a flood of light 
did he throw on what it meant and what its 
obligations were. He said himself that he 
came to be a witness to the truth. He main- 
tained that witness through all perils, and 
upheld it at the cost of life. He was as 
true as steel, so far as we can see, in every 

62 



The Personality of Jesus 63 

one of life's relations into which he entered. 
Indeed, he did not hesitate to claim that he 
was the truth. He felt himself to be the 
guiding light for deceived and bewildered 
humanity so that none who followed him 
should walk in darkness. His simplicity 
and singleness of character, as we read the 
story of his life, are beyond all question. 
He was honest and obedient to the call of 
truth in every fiber of his being. We cannot 
associate with him any sort of pretense or 
unreality or make-believe. He was sin- 
cerity itself, because he lived each hour in the 
eye of God. And all that we have ever 
imagined of fidelity to truth, and fearless, 
flawless honesty before God, is summed up 
in him. 

All these features of the character of 
Jesus, so briefly touched upon, are unmis- 
takable. We need no theologian to explain 
to us their message, nor any church teaching 
to enforce it on our attention or demand for 
it our assent. It lies upon the surface of the 
historic record. The character of Jesus is 
there for all to see. Men may affect to 
ignore it, but it is an affectation as silly as it 
is unworthy. And for those of us who are in 
earnest in seeking honor and glory and im- 
mortality, for ourselves and others, it grips 
our attention inevitably, whatever may be 
the type of our religious experience, because 



64 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

it so vitally concerns the spirit's struggle for 
supremacy. If we are honest in our search 
for spiritual enlargement, we shall hold with 
a sort of life-and-death tenacity to this per- 
sonality of Jesus, demanding to know what it 
means. Here is life at its maximum worth 
and value. How did it come to be, and what 
is its significance.'^ It is of more practical 
concern to us than a mine of fabulous rich- 
ness, for something more precious than gold 
is at stake. It has to do with the possibility 
for us, and for society, of love and purity 
and honor and truth and courage, and all the 
transmutation of baser elements that comes 
with faith in God. What sure conclusions 
may we reach regarding it, and what valida- 
tion does it oifer to the wider message that 
he brought.^ 

The most obvious reflection comes from 
the familiar principle that what is intellectu- 
ally unsound cannot lead in the end to what 
is morally sound. Here we have, in the 
personality of Jesus Christ, the most perfect 
moral soundness of which we have any 
knowledge. It has been tried by every test 
that mortal earnestness could devise, be- 
cause the issues that hang upon it are of such 
tremendous moment. And yet never were 
men so sure that there is no unsoundness in 
it, but the fullest health and energy of the 
spirit. It has been abused and ridiculed 



The Personality of Jesus 65 

ever since that Roman soldier drew the pic- 
ture of the figure with the ass's head, nailed 
to the cross. It has been an offense and a 
stumbling-block to heathen philosophers and 
to all the apostles of self-will, down to the 
Nietzscheans of today. Yet still, for all the 
world in humble earnest search for moral 
victory, it is the revelation of the supreme 
excellence possible to man. 

The intellectual convictions from which 
it sprang are obvious, as we have seen; 
they were those of a complete and unswerving 
faith in the God and Father whom Jesus 
portrayed to the men of his time. They are 
set forth with clearness in the Sermon on 
the Mount, and throughout the gospel 
narratives. They were the root from which 
alone such a life could spring: the life was 
but the natural efflorescence of that perfect 
confidence in Almighty Love. After many 
centuries' experience of the moral strivings of 
men, we cannot conceive its development 
from any other source. Yet here is the con- 
clusion with which we are confronted if the 
destructive criticism of our time is correct: 

The root from which it sprang is a root of 
error. The conviction that nourished it to 
its completeness was a delusion. The char- 
acter that grew out of it was therefore ab- 
normal and improper to man as Nature would 
have him be, and its unfailing appeal to 



66 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

humanity in all ages marks out no way to 
higher life, but only to further misadjust- 
ment and misdevelopment. The profound 
attraction that it has for the human spirit is 
therefore not reasonable or purposive or 
beneficent, but senseless and injurious, as the 
too seductive appeal of error must ever be. 
The light he seems to shed on life is but an 
ignis fatuus after all, and to follow it is to 
plunge into the hopeless dark. 

As we stand face to face with the personal- 
ity of Jesus in our moments of clearest 
spiritual insight, recognizing its appeal to 
all in us that is most divine, and listen with 
utter honesty for our soul's judgment, is 
this the conclusion in which we rest.^ Are we 
not rather compelled — not by any external 
authority but by " the impulsion of our own 
higher selves " — to admit both the divine 
beauty of Jesus' character and the validity 
of the convictions from which it grew.^ 

We find ourselves at middle age still 
hard pressed by temptations and doubts 
and fears, looking more wistfully than 
ever before for a way of courage and strength 
and moral victory. And here we find it, 
in the way by which Jesus found it, the way 
of faith in God. There is a moral certitude 
that is as convincing to the spirit as is a 
mathematical demonstration to the intellect. 
Thus we are as sure that selfish indulgence 



The Personality of Jesus 67 

at the cost of another's ruin is morally de- 
grading as we are that two and two make 
four. We cannot demonstrate it, but we do 
not need to demonstrate it — we know it. 
And thus in facing Jesus Christ, in utter 
honesty of purpose, we are convinced that 
in him is not darkness, but light; not delu- 
sion, but truth; not mockery of human 
hopes, but hope itself. So we take as our 
own his childlike faith in a God who has made 
us for himself, arid who asks from us only 
what he gives — love. 

And not only does the character of Jesus 
Christ lead us to accept without argument 
the faith that shaped his life. Its perfect 
balance, its sanity and wisdom lead us to 
accept as valid the content of his own con- 
sciousness regarding himself. There is a 
convincing unity about his personality that 
will not let us regard him as half sane, half 
crazed — half wise, half foolish. The perfect 
humility with which he surrendered himself 
to his Father's leading, in the purpose to 
listen to his voice, and speak his words, 
and do his works, forbids us to believe that 
he was himself misguided, mistaken as to his 
own worth to men, or that he drew them 
astray because he was himself distraught. 
There is a limpid clearness about his own 
thought of himself, from the very first day 
of his ministry. He came as a Saviour of 



68 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

men. He felt that in him was help; that 
he was a channel of the redeeming energy of 
God for sinful men. He did not try to efface 
himself, as did Confucius as the mere trans- 
mitter of a divine message. He besought 
men to confide in him, to take him as their 
Master, because he knew that he was the way 
to the Father. Life was in him, and light, 
and he knew that as they turned to him they 
found deliverance from the power of sin. 

Nor was this relation of friend and helper 
to helpless men to be a matter of two or three 
years only, and within the tiny limits of his 
own travels. He obviously thought of it as a 
timeless relation, which his own death could 
not affect. His courage and hopefulness 
were largely based on this, that neither the 
Pharisees of his day, nor Herod nor Pilate 
nor Roman soldiers, could bring to an end 
his activities for the bruised and broken- 
hearted children of God. For a moment 
these activities were to be visibly interrupted, 
but only that they might be taken up again 
with wider scope, after his bodily presence 
was withdrawn. It is impossible to read the 
record without finding evidence of this at 
every turn. Even in the Sermon on the 
Mount, in the only passage referring directly 
to himself, he speaks of the Day of Judgment 
as the time when many will hear from his 
lips the final assurance of their own unworthi- 



The Personality of Jesus 69 

ness for the Kingdom. And in all conversa- 
tions with his friends as to their future rela- 
tions with him, he scarcely regarded the 
fact that he would be of the unseen world 
while they were still on earth. Evidently his 
self-consciousness was that of one who stood 
in a unique relation of sonship to God and of 
abiding Saviourhood and Mastership for 
men. He counted himself the Lord of that 
Kingdom for whose coming he bade men 
pray. 

We do not need so much as to allude to 
the metaphysical problem of the trinity, or 
to discuss the question of his deity, but only 
to give due weight to the facts of his self- 
consciousness as they lie upon the surface. 
They were accepted by all his earliest friends 
and followers as indubitable, even if perplex- 
ing, and it was only in later generations that 
men strove so earnestly to explain them in 
creed and formula. It is not easy to see 
how we can believe in him, as a revelation 
of God's truth and grace for human life, and 
not trust these most deeply rooted convictions 
of his being — that he was sent of God to be 
a Saviour, and the light that lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world. It was 
this conviction, inseparable from his faith 
in the One who sent him, that together with 
it made him what he was. We believe in it, 
and in his abiding presence with men, if for 



70 Faith of a AIiddle-Aged IMan 

no other reason, because we cannot honestly 
find a way to disbelieve in him. 

There is also the further reflection that 
such unequaled moral soundness must have 
carried with it a spiritual insight of supreme 
clearness. It is the pure in heart who see 
God. It is those who walk most closely with 
him whoj in the very nature of the case, must 
best understand his ways with men. And it 
follows of necessity from the supreme moral 
excellence of Jesus that he is the supreme 
spiritual teacher. Indeed, this is what it 
means, above all else, to believe in Jesus: 
that we should unhesitatingly recognize the 
unique and satisfying validity of his teach- 
ings. 

What is prayer? Our generation has a 
hundred answers. But to whose judgment 
shall we give most weight? Shall it be first 
of all Mrs. Eddy, or Mrs. Besant, or the 
latest exponent of the New Thought, or 
even the latest philosophical authority at 
Jena or at Harvard? Or shall we trust the 
spiritual insight of Jesus in things pertaining 
to God, as we trust the wisdom of no other 
authority? Is there a life beyond this 
life? If we believe in Jesus, we shall rest 
upon his simple confidence in the matter, 
though all the professors in two continents 
were to bewilder us with arguments. 

To believe in Jesus is to rest upon his clear 



The Personality of Jesus 71 

teachings as on an unshakable foundation. 
And when our heart, in the day of trouble, 
cries out for some assurance that God is still 
behind this remorseless world that crashes 
on unconscious over our quiveringly sensi- 
tive lives, we shall rest upon that unwavering 
trust of Jesus in the Father's care even for 
the sparrow, and his tender love for men and 
women with hearts made to love and suffer 
and seek comfort. 

This is what it means, at its simplest, 
for us to believe in Jesus Christ, as in those 
far-off days when men and women were 
first drawn to him. Leaving on one side the 
Canaanites and Ninevites and the date of 
the prophecy of Daniel, and the genuineness 
of Second Peter, and the order of the docu- 
ments behind the Gospels, it is to turn directly 
to the supreme revelation, to which all the 
spiritual literature of the race leads up, 
the life and message of him whom we re- 
joice to call our Lord. To do this in loyalty 
and love is to find ourselves face to face 
with a divine energy of life and light and love 
that proves its reality by its power. How- 
ever inclusive our faith may come to be, this 
must always be its center, as it is the heart 
of its defense. 

In the desolate gorges of the mountains 
that hem in the Colorado Desert, where only 
cacti and desert shrubs are to be found, one 



72 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

is often surprised and delighted to come 
upon superb palms, springing out of the 
rocky soil. They may stand as solitary 
sentinels, or in groups of two or three, but 
sometimes they cluster together in shady 
groves of hundreds, of an indescribable 
wonder and beauty. Some have been deeply 
charred with fire, others have been scarred 
or wounded by men or animals. Any 
variety of deciduous tree under similar cir- 
cumstances would long ago have been ex- 
terminated. Yet here they have continued 
through the centuries, the splintered blister- 
ing rock of the desert about their feet, but 
with their glorious crown of leaves mounting 
into the blue and rustling softly in the breeze. 

The only explanation of their marvelous 
persistence is that they are endogens — they 
grow from within. Their life sap is not con- 
tained in a thin layer of external bark, always 
exposed to injury, but their every fiber from 
the heart outward is a channel of life and 
nourishment. 

It is a true illustration of the Christian 
faith that grows up from an inner experience 
of the grace and truth that came by Jesus 
Christ. If there is any inner core of loyalty 
and affection in our being, it is vitalized and 
inspired by him who has in fact brought God 
into our life. Our confidence in him becomes 
an inner principle of faith and action, that 



The Personality of Jesus 73 

tends always to grow more strong and fruit- 
ful. It would seem impossible for a faith so 
rooted not to grow with years, in spite of 
shock and accident, simply because it is a 
part of our truest self, and is not vulnerable 
to chance assaults that, however menacing 
at the time, can only after all reach and scar 
the surface. 

There is a type of faith that is not so 
much like a living plant as like a globe of 
glass. An injury at one point of its elabo- 
rate structure will bring the whole to ruin. 
Even though the injury may come through 
the most prayerfully earnest search for truth, 
it is equally destructive. But to live thought- 
fully to middle age is to find faith growing 
more simple — more like what it was in the 
days when men first followed after Jesus, be- 
cause, in spite of priest and synagogue, they 
believed in him. It was his life that drew 
them then; and today it is still his life and 
words and works that draw us on to fuller 
understanding of his mission, and to that 
passionate gratitude for the forgiving love of 
God that underlies and vitalizes every most 
noble motive in human life. 



CHAPTER VII 

The Witness of the Life-Stream 

TT is natural that we should tend to be- 
-■- come pragmatists as we grow older. 
We grow tired of argument, and insist on 
judging men and theories by the way they 
work. As young people we were insatiably 
eager for principles that could be logically 
established. We had the idea that only 
intellectual demonstration could be satis- 
factory as a ground for belief, and that 
philosophy alone could give us those sure 
convictions on which we might build a life. 
It was by delving among the roots of things 
that we were to satisfy ourselves of the truth. 
But as years go by, our point of view in- 
sensibly yet almost inevitably changes. We 
have seen so much of principles that do not 
work, and of professions that do not count, 
that we find ourselves seeking the test of 
truth not among the roots of things but 
among their fruits. A logically impregnable 
philosophy of life and its issues is a most 
agreeable possession, if one can find it; 
but a philosophy which actually works out 
into victorious living is immeasurably better; 
and from the middle-age point of view it is 
more likely to be true. 

7-i 



Witness of the Life-Stream 75 

And still more as regards men, do we judge 
them ruthlessly by their net performance. 
Persuasive speech, soaring aspirations, hu- 
manitarian ideals of purest ray serene, 
the program and promise of disinterested 
reform along many lines, all come to be 
weighed, in the end, in the scales of actual 
yield for human service. Youthful or ardent 
reformers may claim that we who are older 
are stubborn or skeptical or worldly; it 
seems to us that we are merely reasonable. 
They claim that the great principles involved 
should receive our enthusiastic support; 
we feel that the principles should demon- 
strate their soundness by their visible con- 
tribution to human welfare. By their fruits 
we judge them, even when their professions 
soar to heaven. 

Above all is this true of that supreme claim 
on human life, the call to the discipleship of 
Jesus. There may have been a time in our 
experience when we would have settled its 
validity by argument. But the more we see 
of life, if we observe it at close range and 
sympathetically, the more are we impressed 
by what we see in it of the living energy of the 
spirit of Jesus, working still for human happi- 
ness as it used to work in Palestine — only 
a thousand times reinforced and extended. 
Even when we have grown utterly weary of 
the arguments and assertions of the theolo- 



76 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

gians, the sight of this great river of refresh- 
ing turns our thought backward to him who 
is its source, with a new sense of faith and 
devotion, that are beyond all argument and 
that can never leave us so long as we remain 
ourselves. We have come to understand the 
Founder of Christianity, not so much by 
what we were taught, and not wholly by 
what we read in the gospels, but by what we 
see of his life reflected in the lives of men 
and women of today. To judge a leader by 
the working out of his claims and teachings 
through many centuries and in alien civiliza- 
tions is really a terrific test. Yet it is this 
test that so powerfully reinforces our present- 
day confidence in Jesus Christ. 

It was impossible for the first friends of 
Jesus to estimate as can we the power of 
his personality and teaching, just as it was 
impossible for Bucer or Melanchthon to 
judge, as can we of a later age, of their friend 
Luther's strength and weakness. Centuries 
needed to pass before it could be evident how 
the great reformer's timidity in later years 
crept up upon his early boldness, or how the 
elements of weakness in his teaching have 
limited the progress of the church that bears 
his name. The faith of Jesus, tested by its 
fitness for a very simple form of society 
among an Oriental people, might yield a 
very different result when applied to the 



Witness of the Life-Stream 77 

highly complex society and scientifically 
critical judgment of the Western world in 
the twentieth century. Yet the real test of 
its worth must be found in such universal 
appHcability to human need. 

Surely, one who has watched for a whole 
generation the working of the gospel of Jesus 
amid the seething interests of our modern 
life, should be able to arrive at some clear- 
cut conviction as to whether its present-day 
efficiency bears any satisfying witness to its 
divine origin. His observation, in any case, 
must react profoundly on his earlier faith, 
either to confirm or to destroy. 

To many of us, it would seem that there 
is no escaping this conclusion as to the 
influence of Jesus in the life of today, — 
that its divinest activities are those of his 
creation and inspiration. One is reminded 
of that noble couplet, written of the mighty 
dead in a nation's past, 

" They passed, they passed, but cannot pass away, 
For England feels them in her blood like wine." 

The spirit of Jesus thrills in the noblest life- 
blood of this generation, moving it to en- 
deavors worthy of the children of God. 
And though our civilization as a whole is 
still moved by suspicions and envies and 
hatreds, yet the eager impulse of hope and 
love born of God is strengthening every 



78 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

year — and its strength is rooted and builded 
up in the faith of Jesus Christ. 

But here, straight across the path of our 
argument, lies the world-wide devastation 
of the Great War, — like a vast avalanche 
of misery that Christendom has deliberately 
brought down upon itself, at the close of the 
most prosperous and enlightened era of its 
existence. If the spirit of Jesus is living 
today, and even growing in its hold upon the 
hearts of men, how is it that this sum of all 
evils has come upon us.^ 

It scarcely needs serious reflection to per- 
ceive how the aggressive militarism that 
gave it birth has reached its present deadly 
power, not under the fostering of any sort of 
Christian teaching or influence, but in direct 
hostility to the actual teaching of Jesus. 
There is need of plain speaking at this point, 
not in ill-will to any people (because the same 
anti-Christian element is potentially present 
in every one of the great nations), but for 
the sake of the simple truth, which for many 
persons seems to be obscured. 

It is now sixty years and more since Prof. 
Max Miiller, on coming to Oxford, expressed 
his regret that so few of the educated men of 
his own nation attended church; and from 
that time to this there has hardly been any 
observer of the habits of the German people 
but has commented on the almost complete 



Witness of the Life-Stream 79 

absence from public worship of educated 
men. There may be partial explanation of 
this in the coldness of German confessionalism 
on the one hand and the heartlessness of 
much of its radical theology on the other. 
But the fact remains that the men of today 
who constitute the military caste are in 
general — with some exceptions — the men 
who for generations have openly showed their 
distaste for Christian teaching. If one is to 
be a whole-hearted admirer of the " man of 
blood and iron," he has simply to part com- 
pany with the Leader whose disciples were 
to be first of all " tender-hearted, humble- 
minded. '^ Add to this the fact, which so 
universally shocks the American observer, 
of the frank immorality of German university 
life, and the consequent hostility on the part 
of men in their formative years to the stern 
restraint upon personal liberty involved in 
the sincere following of Jesus, and we stand 
in sight of a chief reason why one of the oldest 
of Christian peoples has had for these last 
fifty years, as its proudest and most exalted 
caste, the professional slayers of men. 

This particular development has come out 
of an open estrangement from the teaching of 
Jesus. There is no true Christianity save 
that of actual fellowship of spirit with him 
who made love, mercy and forgiveness the 
primary conditions of discipleship. And 



80 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

one needs only to consider for a moment 
the uncompromising demands of the Master, 
to recognize how essentially anti-Christian, 
rather than un-Christian, are the pride and 
arrogance and love of power that grow rank 
as tropical verdure in any class to which the 
pride of war is as the breath of its nostrils. 
It does not matter what is the race or people. 
Every great nation has in its midst certain 
elements that would find their personal 
fortunes in promoting international ill-will 
and paving the way for wholesale human 
slaughter. 

This is not the product of Christianity, 
nor the fruit of the influence of Jesus. The 
same spirit sent him to his death, and still 
today is secretly but bitterly hostile to his 
gospel of self-denying brotherhood and love. 
There are as many enemies to the spirit of 
Jesus in Christendom today as there were in 
Palestine of old, and there is nothing strange 
in the fact that they should still be strong 
enough, under the intensive culture of 
Prussian militarism for fifty years, to involve 
all Europe, against its better will and con- 
science, in the miseries of a strife that our 
Lord came to make impossible. 

How unremittingly Jesus laid emphasis on 
the fact that it is mercy that God wants of 
men ! — not orthodox confessional worship, 
nor participation in the sacraments, nor 



Witness of the Life-Stream 81 

even sacrificial gifts to him, but kindness to 
one another. And if we seek for the attesta- 
tion of the living energy of Jesus among men 
today we shall find it on every battlefield 
of the almost endless front, where the Red 
Cross is seeking to undo something of the 
horror of cruelty that the sword has just 
achieved. We shall find it, too, in every 
detention and prison camp, where his mes- 
sengers are striving to bring cheer and uplift 
to the millions of the captive. What we 
have seen of war and peace in our short 
lifetime has been enough, not to make us 
doubt the worth of Christianity, but to make 
us draw closer to the Jesus Christ who will 
yet bring war to naught, and whose spirit 
and message are the very revelation of 
God's will for men and nations. 

It is not so much against the lurid back- 
ground of war that the present influence of 
Jesus appears. The forces that he set in 
motion, and in which his spirit still lives and 
moves among us, are visible in every rela- 
tion of human life. By no means are they 
always the ofiicial activities of his Church, 
but their unfailing touchstone is that they 
are the direct outgrowth of fellowship with 
him. They are very far from being as wide- 
spread and effective as they ought to be, 
and as they would be were all Christian men 
disciples of Jesus in deed as well as name. 



82 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 



Yet they serve to illuminate, from a thou- 
sand different angles, the personality of him 
who went about in Galilee doing good, so 
long ago. We estimate him justly through 
those in whom his spirit has free course 
today. 

We look with amazement at his transform- 
ing influence upon peoples who are the most 
brutish of human creatures — least suscepti- 
ble to any upHfting forces because of in- 
herited centuries of savagery and degrada- 
tion. Here, e.g., are the tribes of West 
Coast negroes in the hinterland of Old 
Calabar, — well called the slum-dwellers 
among the negro tribes. They were blood- 
thirsty, cruel, superstitious and indescriba- 
bly vicious and depraved. To them there 
came, not many years ago, the spirit of 
Christ incarnated in a young woman from a 
working home in Dundee — Mary Slessor. 
Not a woman of genius or an extraordinary 
person in any way, apart from her Christ- 
like character, but one who had submitted' 
herself whole-heartedly to the direction of 
the Master. She lived and walked among 
them for thirty years, reproducing imperfectly 
yet as best she could the ways and words of 
Jesus when he was among men. And with 
what result.^ The same sort of result that so 
astounded Darwin on the island of Tierra 
del Fuego. Her unfailing love actually 



Witness of the Life-Stream 83 

broke down the old reign of terror, under 
which no man's life was safe. The unending 
tribal warfare came to an end. The im- 
memorial customs of atrocious cruelty were 
gradually laid aside. And first by ones and 
twos, and later by tens and scores, they 
came to ask that they also might be counted 
as the disciples of him who brought joy and 
peace to men through righteousness. 

In all this we are face to face with more 
than the benign but unaided influence of 
one good woman. We have to do with a 
redeeming energy that is divinely potent 
and merciful; that can forgive sin and cleanse 
the soul and re-create the affections, making 
a new creature in the face of almost incalcula- 
ble odds. It is the communicated energy of 
Jesus, after nineteen hundred years. As one 
observes it closely and sympathetically he is 
led to conclude that this transforming and 
almost miraculous energy of grace is not 
something that has filtered down from the 
Nazarene prophet through these many 
generations, but that it is a fresh and living 
force — potent and vital — because it is 
the directly imparted spirit and saving power 
of him who came to seek and to save the lost 
by love, and who said that he would be with 
his disciples to the end of time. It is as 
new as today's sunlight, because it comes 
from the heart of God, and in its fresh and 



84 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

vivid power it is the witness that he is with 
us still. 

We consider also the marvel — though it 
is a marvel so familiar in its general features 
as to be almost commonplace — of the fruit- 
age of Jesus' life in the case of Miss Slessor 
herself. It is unmistakable that Jesus, when 
on earth, took peasant fishermen and, with 
their consent and cooperation, made them 
an intellectual and moral force that has not 
ceased until today. His fellowship made 
them great. And the ability to impart a 
divine fire, that transmutes selfish men into 
the inspired messengers of God, has not 
suffered through the ages. 

Mary Slessor was a drunkard's child. At 
the age of eleven she was forced to become 
the bread-winner of the family. At fourteen 
she was an expert weaver in the mills of 
Dundee. Thousands like her, from homes 
of bitter poverty and wretchedness, have gone 
the way of their environment and succumbed 
to the forces of evil that were too strong for 
them. But he who was a good friend to 
tempted girls in Galilee so long ago drew her 
to himself, and to a way of strength and 
safety that his companionship alone could 
have made possible for her. By the time 
she had reached young womanhood she was a 
trusted worker among the rough boys and 
girls of the Dundee slums. She longed for a 



Witness of the Life-Stream 85 

life of service among those needier still, in 
the utter darkness of heathenism; and at 
twenty-eight she was sent out to the field of 
Calabar in West Africa. 

She became a pioneer missionary among 
tribes not yet touched by the outermost 
fringe of civilization — whose character can 
be judged from the fact that their only im- 
ports were guns, rum and chains. There 
she lived for the most part quite alone, al- 
ways in frail health and often racked with 
pain or helpless from prostrating illness. 
By sheer weight of character she made her- 
self a name honored through all Nigeria, by 
government officials and traders as well as 
by the natives. She was " everybody's 
mother," and her name will be held in venera- 
tion through all that darkened region for 
many years to come. Her work has entered 
into the foundations of the Africa that is to 
be. 

What are we to think of him who — if 
the clearest utterance of her own conscious- 
ness is to be trusted — wrought this work of 
power in and through Mary Slessor? We are 
all painfully familiar with the workings of 
untruth and feebleness and folly in human 
lives. We are surrounded on every hand by 
lives that are purposeless, apathetic, helpless 
to save themselves, and yet more helpless to 
bring anything of aid to others. That is the 



86 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

natural fruit of living by wrong principles — 
the degeneration and impoverishment of 
life. But here, all about us, we see this 
transcendent power of creative and trans- 
forming life, springing from belief in Jesus 
Christ and daily conscious association with 
him. It replaces inertness and indifference 
with moral energy, and brings a divine beauty 
of human character where there had been 
the unloveliness of sullen resistance to the 
good. 

Here, e. g., is a lad in college who is going 
wrong. What with his drinking and gamb- 
ling and evil associations, he is living every 
day in defiance of his conscience, and has 
already grown morose and ill-tempered be- 
cause of the inward division against himself. 
He is shirking his work and is in continual 
trouble with his professors. He has lost the 
power of close concentration upon any task, 
and is tormented with the knowledge that he 
is wasting his powers and bringing sorrow to 
those who love him best. Yet partly in de- 
fiance and still more in helplessness he goes 
on his way downward, struggling pitifully 
from time to time to save himself before it is 
too late, but powerless to change. 

Such a man is brought vividly face to face 
with the offered help of a living Jesus Christ; 
and after a fierce inward strife determines, 
as he says, '' to give Jesus Christ a chance in 



Witness of the Life-Stream 87 

his life." In that new strength he gives 
himself to God for better or for worse. And 
what a resurrection follows. We are not 
talking of religious theory or of any strange 
or rare experience, but of what every obser- 
vant college man has had the chance to see. 
The evil habits fall away. The taste for 
forbidden things is somehow dried up at the 
source. The inward division ceases and the 
old moroseness and ill-humor give place to 
cheerfulness and a new spirit of good fellow- 
ship. His power of work returns, and he 
finds his college duties easy and agreeable 
where he had thought them impossible. 
He is a man given back to society; and to 
the anxious father and mother at home he is a 
lost son restored. And so far as conscious- 
ness can analyze the situation, it is Jesus 
Christ who has done this. His power has 
been vital enough, when appealed to, to 
reach the lad in the crisis of his need, to 
pluck his feet out of the miry clay and 
to set them on a rock. 

This is what Jesus did once in Capernaum 
and Jericho. It is what he is doing today 
in every city and town of this new world. 
And what then shall we think of him, and 
of the worth of his claims, and the truth of 
his gospel.'^ Is he who brings truth and 
honor to its perfect flower only an outworn 
doctrine of men, himself untrue.'^ As a 



88 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

matter of fact we measure his worth and 
truth by the reality of his present power to 
make a broken life worthy and faithful, and 
by that pragmatic measurement we find him 
infinitely good. Would we not cleave to 
such a Friend of men as that? Would we 
not trust his guidance in things of the spirit, 
without waiting for the final answer to all our 
doubts ? 

And if there are flaws in the pen and ink 
record of his life, there are no flaws in the 
testimony of this work before our eyes. It 
is no fruit of blundering or error that brings 
men accidentally to stumble into life abun- 
dant. We recognize it as part of a divine 
order of mercy and truth. And we believe 
from the heart that he spoke truth when he 
said that he came to bring life to men, and 
we believe that here in our own lifetime we 
see the fulfillment of his words. 

The element in our civilization of today 
that cheers us most of all, in spite of every 
appearance to the contrary, is the fast grow- 
ing spirit of brotherhood, that will not allow 
a conscientious man to look coldly or in- 
differently upon his neighbor's welfare. The 
demand for justice first of all, and then for 
something more than justice, in the relations 
between different classes and between capital 
and labor, is a part not only of awakening 
class consciousness, but of an awakening 



Witness of the Life-Stream 89 

response to the old, old teachings of Jesus. 
Millions of men in the past have read his 
story of the Good Samaritan with as honest a 
purpose to be true to its spirit as has any 
reformer of today. Yet how incredibly 
slow they were to perceive some of its most 
obvious implications. But in our day the 
quickened interest in the personality of 
Jesus has led to a far wider and more thought- 
ful study of his social teaching, and his spirit 
has gripped the hearts and consciences of 
men in such wise that there is a new vision 
among us of what the Kingdom of God on 
earth should be, and a new dedication to its 
service. The moral awakening has of course 
spread far beyond the limits of the professed 
followers of Jesus, yet this rebirth of hope for 
society is, at its inmost heart, the fruit of a 
spiritual fellowship with this Elder Brother 
of all men. As men and women actually 
receive and assimilate the life-spirit of Jesus, 
and turn to him in loyal discipleship, they 
become helpers and saviors of society, be- 
cause they have felt in their own souls the 
power and wonder of self-sacrificing love. 
This is what we have seen in our own life- 
time in thousandfold repetition, until it 
is as impossible for us to doubt it as to doubt 
the procession of the equinoxes. 

Last of all in this fragmentary survey, 
one must give full weight to the fact that 



90 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

even in this twentieth century our human 
nature finds in a life of thoroughgoing Chris- 
tian discipleship its own completest satis- 
faction. In a world of order and reason this 
affords a " tremendous presumption '' that 
such a life is in harmony with an actually 
existing world of reality. If the inspiration 
of Jesus were somehow wearing out as a 
life principle, if the motives centering in 
him were gradually growing pale and in- 
effective, leading men to weariness and disap- 
pointment as years multiply, it would justly 
raise doubt as to the abiding power of his 
spirit. But the opposite is the fact. 

It is a characteristic of middle age, under 
ordinary conditions, that the enthusiasms of 
early years tend to grow pale and ineffectual, 
if not altogether to die out. The generous 
flame of a natural faith in God and man with 
which we may have started out has been 
dimmed by so many shocks of hard experi- 
ence, that more and more we tend to protect 
ourselves from disappointment by trusting 
little and expecting less, and our high ideals 
of unselfish devotion are chilled into a 
commonplace acceptance of the present 
sorry scheme of things as more or less in- 
evitable. How many there are whose once 
high faith in God's purpose and man's 
possibilities has died down into the ^' practi- 
cal man's " tolerant indifference toward any 



Witness of the Life-Stream 91 

urgent or aggressive Christian effort. And 
how many more whose lives grow poor and 
disappointing as they feel themselves losing 
touch with the sources of any passionate 
devotion to any cause, however great. 

It is the inseparable note of any genuine 
and living association with Jesus Christ that 
the springs of enthusiastic motive are kept 
fresh and living. One simply cannot share 
his spirit without being filled with a great 
purpose and a great expectation, that do 
not wear threadbare with the years. Other 
life motives are conspicuously inadequate. 
The passion for money, which seems to be 
the prevailing ambition in our own land, for 
all its fascination, most often leads anywhere 
but to contentment and strong peace of soul. 
The search for pleasure tragically soon be- 
comes a heart-breaking weariness. Even the 
noblest ends can show no fruit of steadily 
deepening satisfaction such as the fellowship 
of Jesus bears. As A. C. Benson has re- 
cently said of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who 
with his great open nature certainly " warmed 
both hands at the fire of life," " From the 
beginning of the world the persistent care 
for outward beauty has brought with it 
weariness and satiety of spirit." Could one 
find anywhere under heaven an honest and 
earnest disciple of Jesus to whom the multi- 
plying years of endeavor to serve him have 



92 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

brought only satiety and weariness? To 
any one who has known many followers of 
Jesus the anomaly is unthinkable. Human 
experience, with infinite repetition and varia- 
tion, bears witness that he is still a spring of 
hope and life and joy to all who make him the 
Master of their lives. 

All these things we have seen, year after 
year, for many years. Especially if fortune 
has been kind to us in throwing us with those 
whose chief interest in life is their unselfish 
devotion to the Kingdom of God, our whole 
horizon has been filled with the evidences of 
a redeeming energy, still working in our world 
in myriad ways of beneficence and power. 
This ever-widening stream of the most costly 
energy in life — the energy of love — leads 
back to Jesus Christ. Historically it leads 
back to him through weary centuries of 
alternating aspiration and disappointment; 
but experimentally it springs direct from 
him who is now, in our day, the revealer of 
God to men through living contact with our 
souls. 

How can we then, who want the best in 
life, turn doubtfully away from Jesus Christ, 
because we cannot grasp the mystery of his 
infinite service to mankind? How can we 
do other than believe in him, even though our 
faith be so sharply hedged about with limita- 
tions that we fret ourselves against the 



Witness of the Life-Stream 93 

problems that we cannot answer? Judged 
by the present-day witness to his influence 
he is still what he once claimed to be, the 
Friend of Sinners and the great Minister to 
needy men. We need him, for ourselves 
and for the needy world that misunder- 
stands him, beyond all expression. To let 
him go would be not only to lose the order 
and purpose from our lives, but to find our- 
selves abandoned to the harsh vicissitudes of 
later years with only mocking voices all 
about us, proclaiming moral chaos where we 
had looked for law and love. 

So we believe in him. Not because of 
church or council or creed, not because we 
have been trained or bidden so to do, not 
even because we long for the comfort of such 
a faith, but because we cannot be our truest 
selves and not yield ourselves to his direction. 
Our faith is the fruit of our experience of 
ourselves and God, — it is our response to 
his voice in our own soul. And on it we 
would build further trust in God and in 
his ways, as our eyes may be opened to per- 
ceive their truth. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Place of the Cross 

"DUT is this the whole story of the soul's 
-■^ instinctive response to Jesus Christ? 
Have we given full account of the compulsion 
that his personality lays upon our spirits? 
Manifestly we have not. The deepest ele- 
ment in the church's allegiance to its Master 
through all these years has merely been al- 
luded to, simply because in our day it is the 
element likely to be last present in our 
thought. 

It is not open to doubt that the ethical 
response to the divine beauty and power of 
Jesus' character is at the heart of the Chris- 
tian experience, as it is at the center of faith. 
We make our choice of God through what we 
have seen of him in the life and teaching of 
his Son. So far we can see clearly. Perhaps 
if we were the children of our own generation 
alone we should be content with seeing only 
as far as this. But obviously we cannot be 
content, because such a summing up of the 
Christian experience in its response to Jesus 
Christ is so inadequate. We have not yet 
taken account of one of its most essential 
features, and, till we have done so, any faith, 

94 



The Place of the Cross 95 

or any life based on that faith, must be 
halting and incomplete. 

The ethical choice of Jesus, because he 
presents the supreme moral ideal for human 
life, is certainly at the very foundation of 
Christianity. But there is a phase of Chris- 
tian experience which is, as it were, distinct 
from this, though never separable from it. 
It is concerned with Jesus not as disciple 
with Teacher, but as lost men with a Saviour. 
It is not moral idealism that draws them to 
him, but the stress of bitter need; and hum- 
ble gratitude for deliverance is the conscious 
beginning of the new life. The moral im- 
pulse is inseparably present, but the sense of 
need and rescue and mercy fills the foreground 
of consciousness. 

All of Christian history, through nine- 
teen hundred years, is filled and colored with 
experiences such as these. Even the great 
social and humanitarian movements have 
started from them. The New Testament 
has them ever in view, and our own age, 
strange as it seems to some of us who have 
led sheltered or bookish lives, is still as 
familiar with them, in every country under 
heaven, as was the early church. To many 
of our churches they would seem strange and 
out of date — out of harmony with the 
intellectual movement of our times. And, 
indeed, they are out of harmony with the 



96 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

spirit of many of our churches, but obviously- 
most harmonious still with the spirit of the 
Church of God. 

The word Saviour is seldom heard from 
many of our pulpits of today. The thought 
of the rising generation is too absorbingly 
engrossed with other things. And yet it is 
undoubtedly around the facts of Saviourhood 
and salvation, and the passion of answering 
love that goes out to that mighty deliverer 
from sin, that the living aggressive Chris- 
tianity of our day still centers. Even in the 
great social movements of our day, so far 
as they are actually dynamic, the inner 
forces are kept burning by nothing less than 
faith in the reality of redeeming love as 
the expression of God's attitude to his 
children. 

The longer one lives, unless he is bound in 
the shallows of that popular superficial think- 
ing which curiously deletes the intractable 
problems of personal sin from the field of its 
observation, the more is he compelled to make 
a stern effort to find at least some place in 
his faith and experience for all the world of 
reality that centers primarily about the 
cross of Christ, as the supreme revelation 
and expression of God's compassion and 
sorrow for his children's sin. We may meet 
with ill success. But any attempt to under- 
stand the religious life as a whole demands 



The Place of the Cross 97 

that we should not evade this, its profoundest 
and most insistent concern. 

The industrial problems that now demand 
the utmost concentration of Christian thought 
and purpose are for the most part the out- 
growth of the last one hundred years, and 
perhaps in another hundred years will cease 
to hold their present place of prominence. 
But the old distress of helplessness in the 
face of sensuality and greed and pride, the 
old, old despair of a heart averse to God and 
his ways, coupled with the longing for de- 
liverance and restoration, and the old joyous 
answer of a life's devotion to the Friend of 
sinners who sought out and saved the one 
ready to perish, — these currents of fear and 
wretchedness, of faith and joy and love, will 
run as strong a thousand years from now 
as ever they did when the churches of Rome 
and Corinth first held out the new hope to 
hopeless men. The shame and guilt of 
being inextricably entangled by evil affec- 
tion with what is hateful to God is a typical 
human experience that seems not to alter 
very much from age to age, however much 
this complacent generation may have for- 
gotten it. The fact that the prayer of the 
publican seldom occurs to our minds now- 
adays, much less rises to our lips, does not 
necessarily mean that our age has less need 
of the mercy of God than any other; it may 



98 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

only mean that we have grown strangely 
insensible to our tragic misuse of life and of 
its opportunities. 

In any analysis of the human response to 
the personality of Jesus, it is necessary to 
take thoughtful account of this further 
element — the element of response to his 
death as the culmination of his work of re- 
demption for his people. Even the inner 
circle of faith's defence would be seriously 
weakened if that constraining appeal to trust 
and confidence were withdrawn. If belief in 
Jesus is, indeed, faith's foundation, we should 
recognize with fullest sympathy how com- 
pelling and how satisfying human experience 
has found that belief to be in the fullness of 
its New Testament content. 

We shall do well to face clearly at the out- 
set the fact that it is well-nigh impossible 
for our own generation to enter sympathet- 
ically into the profound teaching of Paul in 
this respect, or even into the experience of 
the men and women of New England, a 
hundred years ago. No age can maintain 
an uninterrupted appreciation of the whole 
range of religious truth, even so far as the 
truth is known to it. Under varying condi- 
tions, material, intellectual and moral, one 
phase of truth after another has its turn in 
the foreground of thought and experience, 
and is then crowded into the background by 



The Place of the Cross 99 

sheer force of reaction under changed en- 
vironment. And it is beyond question that 
our own generation, after an age in which 
the death of Christ and its theological im- 
plications were forced into an unnatural and 
often mechanical prominence, has swung to 
the full opposite extreme; so that religiously 
minded young people of our day have largely 
ceased even to think about that which was 
the central factor of the Christian life in the 
experience of their grandparents. 

Any one who knows at first-hand the 
student body of our country, with its eager 
idealism and generous appreciation for any 
spiritual message that seems to them to 
bear the stamp of reality, knows also how 
blankly it often listens to any direct pres- 
entation of the death of Christ or the work 
of the atonement. Exceptional men will 
have a different experience. But most 
speakers to college audiences know what 
it is to see the attitude of keen respon- 
siveness to the ethical and social appeal 
of Jesus change almost instantly to a look of 
puzzled uncertainty or indifference when the 
subject is turned to his offering of himself 
to save men from sin. It is as though a 
palpable curtain fell between speaker and 
audience, when the thought passed out of the 
realm in which they were living and thinking 
into what they felt was merely doctrinal and 



100 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

— to them at least — unreal. This would 
perhaps not be true in the case of the 
avowedly evangelistic address, or in times of 
special spiritual interest, for which much 
heart preparation had been made; neither is 
it a wholesome condition nor one for which 
we need make apology. But it tells its 
own story of the actual spiritual experience 
of sincere and earnest minds in the prevailing 
atmosphere of our schools. 

It is of little use to preach doctrines that 
for any reason find no echo in the experience 
of the hearers, or to find fault with the 
moral honesty of those who unconsciously 
reflect the intellectual limitations of their 
own time. Yet it will not always be as it 
is today. And even meanwhile it is a good 
thing to be engrossed in carrying the Mas- 
ter's teaching into its social applications, and 
the time is sure to come when men will 
inquire again with the old fervor wherein 
lies the power of the gospel that they have 
been applying for society's regeneration. 

The faith of today is true faith and fruit- 
ful, as was that of the earliest followers of 
Jesus, who never reflected whither it was 
leading them or what was the inner explana- 
tion of its hold upon their lives. But re- 
flection must come with years — the implicit 
must be worked out into the explicit — and 
neither our age nor any other will ever rest 



The Place of the Cross 101 

content with a devotion to Jesus Christ 
that does not seek to answer the profoundest 
inquiries that can be brought as to its origin 
and significance. We do not grow less 
solicitous about reality as we grow older; 
rather do we become more earnestly and 
wistfully eager to find out where the genuine 
sources of power and comfort in religion lie. 
And the fact that the typical reading and 
thinking public of our day is preoccupied 
with the practical uses of Christian truth, 
rather than with the deep springs of that 
truth itself, cannot long blind us to the un- 
changing dynamic realities that have in 
fact made Christianity a world religion. 

How evident it grows, as life goes on and 
our insight into its needs increases, that this 
dynamic is not found where we have some- 
times half believed it was. It is not in the 
fact that its founder is the perfect man who 
realizes our ideal for all humanity, or that it 
reveals the highest ethical system known, or 
even that it affords the clearest vision of 
God; but that, through and through, it is 
surcharged with redemptive power. Its mes- 
sage is — however old-fashioned it may sound 
— a glad tidings of salvation; it is a gospel 
of redemption and restoration. And some- 
thing more than this is clearly to be seen. 
Many a religion has started with the ardent 
wish to be redemptive, but has failed for 



102 Faith of a •Middle-Aged Man 

lack of power. The gospel of Jesus has the 
power — because it alone tells of a redemp- 
tion based on infinite love, suffering for hu- 
man sin. It tells of One who pays the costly 
price of infinite effort and sorrow to achieve 
the end that no conceivable lesser sacrifice 
could bring to pass. 

Just here it would seem to some that we 
are running out of the region of reality and 
actual experience into the forsaken field of 
a theology that baffles human understanding. 
But are we outrunning even our common 
human experience of the cost and method of 
moral redemption as we see it operating in 
lives about us.^ To be sure, the divine 
method of salvation must have its Godward 
side, reaching out into mysteries we cannot 
fathom, as must every truth where it im- 
pinges on the infinite. But this only reas- 
sures our reason. For wxre God's plan of 
love and the resources of its power so shallow 
as to lie all open to our comprehension, we 
should be assured that they were indeed 
limited and of merely finite efficacy. It is 
possible for our speculation and even our 
formulated theology to press out into this 
region of the absolute, where w^ords and 
metaphors chiefly mock us by their inade- 
quacy. But we of today have little taste 
for such adventure. Nor can this effort to 
fathom the unfathomable be of such im- 



The Place of the Cross 103 

portance as good men have sometimes 
thought; for we are sure that the require- 
ments of Jesus upon his disciples' faith were 
of a notable matter-of-fact-ness and sim- 
plicity. 

Even within the region of our common 
experience of life, however, lies this simple 
yet always startling fact of redemption 
through love that suffers for another's sin. 
And its plainest workings open to us strange 
depths of reality and power, that unmis- 
takably underlie also the life and death of 
Jesus, and that have caught and held, and 
will forever hold, the reverent wonder and 
passionate gratitude of humanity. 

It is only as life goes on and our experience 
of men widens, that we come to understand 
how difficult a thing it is, and how costly of 
effort and sacrifice, to recover a soul that 
has gone wrong. Multitudes of people never 
do discover how difficult a thing it is, for the 
simple reason that they have never tried. 
They satisfy themselves with all sorts of 
theories as to how base elements in human 
nature may be transformed into noble ones, 
without cost to any one of personal love or 
painful sacrifice. It is to be done by medical 
or surgical treatment, or by better education, 
or shorter work hours, or improved tene- 
ments, or the suppression of the saloon, or a 
new economic system, or by one or another 



104 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

of multifarious humanitarian readjustments, 
which are to accomplish easily and naturally 
and on a wide scale the moral uplift of the 
people. 

If we have ever seriously tried to reach 
even a single life, weakened in will and 
poisoned in spirit by vicious indulgence, em- 
bittered and defiant toward all that stands 
for law and moral restraint, we have had some 
insight into the almost insurmountable diffi- 
culty of bringing spiritual renewal to one 
who refuses it, or recreating the heart of one 
whose pleasures are rooted in evil aff'ection. 
Men are always rediscovering the fact — 
as Thomas Mott Osborne has recently 
brought it into prominence again — that 
nothing but love can do this work, and, even 
then, only at its own personal cost and sacri- 
fice. Money cannot purchase it. Neither 
the most perfect organization nor the most 
highly paid ofiicials can be depended on to 
secure it. It goes without saying that there 
are many forms of social amelioration that 
are efiicient aids, and that we are bound for 
every reason to support them to the best of 
our capacity. But in the last analysis the 
deep needs of the individual soul, the needs 
which blind and bewilder and ultimately 
destroy, are only to be relieved by love. 
And however we may carp at individualism, 
the last stage of social progress, like its first, 



The Place of the Cross 105 

will still be dealing with the problem of 
individual need and individual redemption. 

Perhaps most men who have reached 
middle age have tried their hand once or 
twice at '' reclaiming '' some one who only 
half desired to be reclaimed. We were willing 
to give a certain amount of time and money 
and patience in the effort, so long as it did 
not interfere with our business or the orderly 
routine of life. But the chances are that we 
did not succeed, because our patience did not 
hold out. Possibly we felt that we were 
being deceived or that the man was not 
rightly keeping his promises, or that his 
will was too weak; but in any case our 
compassion was not strong enough to stand 
the strain, and we gave up the attempt as 
unfortunately hopeless. We had not much 
love to go upon, and were pathetically unable 
to pay the price demanded, of an unbounded 
sympathy and forgiving patience. 

It would do us all good if we could look 
in from time to time at any of the numberless 
city missions to lost men, where this work of 
rescue from the nethermost depths of need 
is continually going on. It is a revelation 
of what compassion means. It would re- 
mind some of us of what God's love must 
have had to bear with us. Sam Hadley, 
who took over the work of Jerry McAulcy's 
mission on Water Street, was asked how 



106 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

often they took a man back who had dis- 
appointed them. '' We never give a man 
up in Water Street/' was the reply. The 
loving sympathy has to be almost inex- 
haustible to carry out that sort of life-saving. 
It must bear with a weak will and a moral 
fiber that seems to have rotted away, until 
seventy times seven. But often it is in the 
case of those who seemed to be hopelessly 
weak or hopelessly perverse, that the finest 
results of a firm Christian character have 
been secured. But at a price far beyond the 
power of most of us to pay. We care too 
much for our own selves, our own comfort, 
or — as we might say — our own self-respect, 
to follow such broken lives for weeks and 
months of unfailing prayer and help and 
brotherly love. The pain and shame of 
their degradation would actually invade our 
life and spoil our peace of mind if we took 
them so completely on our hearts. That of 
course is not to be expected. We are loth 
to learn the lesson of the words, 

"Measure thy life by loss instead of gain, 
Not by wine drunk but by the wine poured forth, 
For love's strength standeth in love's sacrifice." 

It is by slow degrees that we come to see 
and to believe that it is only by such love, 
actually sufi'ering with another's wretched- 
ness, that any great deliverance is wrought. 



The Place of the Cross 107 

The working of this principle is perhaps 
most clearly seen in the case of mother and 
son. The boy is wayward. He goes out 
into the world to li^^e a life that sears his 
mother's heart to think upon. Little by 
little his friends leave him, unable to do 
more for him, or to bear with the disgrace 
with which he has clothed himself. But his 
mother suffers with him still. It writes 
deep lines upon her face, but she cannot 
give him up or cease to follow him with her 
prayer and love. And in the end, it may 
even be after she has died, her love and 
sorrow bring him back to righteousness. 
Mission workers have seen this repeated 
times almost past numbering. She has 
patiently borne the pain that should have 
been his, and in so doing has redeemed his 
soul. 

The little that we see and know of what 
great love can do in human relationships, 
if it is willing to pay the cost of suffering, 
leads our thought up to God. What would 
he be likely to do, out of his infinite com- 
passion for his children's sin and shame? 
A poor, erring, earthly father like David, long 
ago, could cry out in an agony of unavailing 
longing, " Would God that I had died for 
thee, O Absalom, my son, my son." Many 
a father and mother would lay down life in 
utter gladness, could it bring back a lost son 



108 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

or daughter. How far would God go to 
bring home in penitence and joy the dis- 
tressed children of His household? 

The question must have been one on which 
Jesus pondered with intensest feeling as a 
boy and a young man. As his attention 
came to be more and more riveted by that 
majestic picture of the suffering servant in 
Isaiah, the wonder must have grown upon 
him whether that sorrowful destiny was to 
be his. If he was to be the servant and 
deliverer of his unwilling people, must his 
way lead through that desolation of spirit.'^ 
Did such a vocation demand such a sacrifice.^ 
Could he not be his people's teacher and 
healer and helper there among his own sunny 
hillsides of Galilee, at a less cost than this? 
It is plainly evident that, before the end, 
Jesus fully accepted for himself that dread 
vocation of love. He must needs be despised 
and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and 
acquainted with grief. Naturally he did 
not speak much of it. There was no ear 
from which he could expect any response of 
intelligence or of sympathy. But he ac- 
cepted for himself the solemn necessity, if 
he was to carry out his Father's will. 

In that deathless story he told of the 
wastrel son, returning home after he had 
reached the end of the pass'age, he simply said 
that the father ran to meet the returning 



The Place of the Cross 109 

boy, and fell on his neck and kissed him* 
How he ran to meet him, and what it meant 
to him of mingled sorrow and gladness, we 
read in the life and death of Jesus. How 
the father had suffered in the son's wrong- 
doing and misery, and at what cost his love 
won the final victory, we partly understand 
as we remember how Jesus gave himself for 
his friends. 

No doubt, in certain moods, this tragic 
element in the relation of God to men does 
not appeal to any sense of need within us. 
When the tides of strength and self-confidence 
run strong and nothing disturbs our pleasant 
sense of moral security, it may even seem to 
us " foolishness,'' as it has to so many from 
the first days till now. But there will 
always be those who recognize instinctively 
its divine reasonableness in such a world as 
this, and who turn to it with abandonment of 
faith and longing. They are our brothers 
and sisters who are actually sinking in the 
depths, and who have reached the place of 
no hope. 

Like that young woman in New York 
City who was met several years ago coming 
up out of one of those underground cellars in 
the slums; body and soul alike at the point of 
death from her brief lifetime of unbridled 
dissipation, — as pitiful a bit of human 
wreckage as was ever cast up by the waves of 



110 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

that great sea of wickedness. Long past the 
point of despair, she was met by the story of a 
Saviour who gave himself for such sin as 
hers. What it meant to her, more than one 
great audience in New York heard, in after 
days of the three years that remained to her 
of life, and heard with unconcealed tears 
upon their faces, as she poured out that 
story of love unto death that had reached 
across the centuries to her agony of need. 

But obviously it was not for the very 
wicked only that Jesus gave himself — for 
such manifestly lost souls as drift into a 
present-day mission in our slums. Indeed 
he seemed to find it more difficult to reach 
the heart of the highly respectable classes, 
in their pride and complacency and selfish- 
ness. He gave himself for such men as 
Thomas and Peter and John, — partly good 
and partly bad, yet distressingly weak and 
ignorant of their Father's will. He brought 
to them the revelation of w^hat God's love is 
really like, and of what it would suffer to 
win them wholly away from sin, as true sons 
of the holy God. 

It is too much for us to grasp; it is beyond 
our comprehension, as infinite love must 
infinitely outrun our experience of what 
human love can undertake and accomplish. 
But more than when we were young people 
we feel that the reality of such a love unto 



The Place of the Cross 111 

the uttermost must have a place in the divine 
plan. It must needs be there, in view of our 
bitter need. Indeed, if we had not the record 
of Jesus' death, we should have to imagine 
some unrevealed wonder of divine effort and 
sacrifice, in the presence of this world's 
extremity. We have seen and felt too much 
of the costliness of redemption to suppose 
that this world's waywardness is to be lightly 
turned to the penitent obedience of love. 

The generation that follows ours, after the 
Great War is over, will not find it so hard as 
we have done to enter into this solemn 
unwelcome truth of sacrifice even unto death 
for a great end. Innumerable homes will 
have made the last and bitterest renuncia- 
tion that human hearts can face, for a high 
and wholly impersonal cause. If on a 
hundred battlefields the commonest of men 
have risen to a devotion of sacrifice sealed 
with their life-blood, shall we be too soft and 
delicate to think or speak of what our Lord 
would do to establish his peace and righteous- 
ness in a kingdom of human hearts, wide as 
the universe and without end ? 

And so, although we may be quite unable 
to enter into the rapturous experience of 
Paul, we also are bound to Jesus by something 
more than the tie of moral idealism. He 
loved us and gave himself for us. The 
chastisement of our peace was upon him and 



112 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

by his stripes we are healed. We have 
never been " lost men '' — we may never 
have been so much as in sight of any ex- 
tremity of need. The redeeming work began, 
for us, far back of our personal experience 
— generations back. We had from infancy 
" the heritage of those that fear his name." 
But it is still that revelation of infinite love 
that came by Jesus Christ — love unto death 
that we might be freed from sin — to which 
we owe all we have and are. He is our 
Saviour, though often we forget it. We be- 
lieve in Jesus, not only because all we know of 
good centers in him, but because this goodness 
has been for us. We trust him not only as 
we trust in the good, the beautiful, and the 
true, but as the one who, having begun a 
good work in us, is able to save unto the 
uttermost. 

For all these reasons that we have been 
considering we believe in Jesus Christ. 
However the currents of critical discussion 
may eddy to and fro, and whatever may be 
the popular philosophy of religion among the 
wise and prudent, we are drawn by an ir- 
resistible compulsion to cleave to him in 
life and death. Many things may be clouded 
to our apprehension, and the wavering of our 
belief may cause us heavy disappointment; 
but that Jesus Christ is the Master to whom 
we would utterly submit our lives, so far as 



The Place of the Cross 113 

our stubborn self-love permits, we can have 
no shadow of doubt. It is not only because 
all those qualities of soul which we most 
revere are summed up in him, and because 
we find in him a living source of redeeming 
energy, but because there is in us that which 
cries out for him, and finds satisfaction only 
in the eternal love which he revealed and 
which was in him incarnate. 

To whom else shall we go? His truth and 
power have met the most searching tests 
that our soul, in its struggle for self-preserva- 
tion, knows how to apply. And it is out of 
this stormy experience of the spirit that we 
come to take his faith as our faith, satisfied 
that the words of eternal life are with him. 



Part II 
THE OUTLOOK OF FAITH 



CHAPTER IX 
The Fact of God 

WHAT then is the outlook on life, 
when life is two-thirds done, of the 
one who believes in Jesus? The cheery 
optimism of youthful high spirits and inex- 
perience is likely to have been slain beyond 
recovery long before that age is reached. 
And if life now is to be bright with hope, 
it must be for different reasons and in the 
face of greater obstacles than those we took 
most account of years ago. It is the purpose 
of the following chapters to set forth the 
unabashed optimism of the man who looks 
forward and upward in the faith of Jesus, in 
spite of all that man or Nature can offer to 
daunt his courage. 

It was so kindly a spirit as Mark Twain 
who said " The man who isn't a pessimist is a 
fool." And one who lived the simple life so 
near to Nature as did the naturalist, Richard 
Jefferies, gave it as his judgment on all 
human striving, that '' virtue, humanity, the 
best and most beautiful conduct, is wholly in 
vain. . . . Lives spent in doing good have 
been lives nobly wasted." One might multi- 
ply such characteristic utterances of our 
time a hundredfold, running the whole 

117 



118 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

gamut of disillusionment and despondency 
— some pathetically wistful, some actively 
vicious. They are the voices that are ever 
in our ears, to which inner suggestions of 
fear and weakness are but too ready to 
respond. 

Nevertheless, it is to be noted that without 
exception they are from those who give no 
credence to the life and message of Jesus. 
What we see as we look into the present or 
future depends on whether we are standing 
on low ground or on the heights. To stand 
with Jesus is to stand in a high place, from 
which vision is least Impeded. And those 
who believe in him have a far different 
witness to bear from those who do not, simply 
because it is through his eyes that they look 
out upon the realities of heaven and earth. 
What these realities are, which smite down 
fear and sternly forbid anxiety, which distil 
joy and refresh with strength, we have now 
to consider; and to consider from the vantage 
point of those who have tested them, and 
tested life by them, through the vicissitudes 
of many years. 

There is only one reality which could 
possibly be placed first in the experience and 
faith of Jesus — the fact of God. And as 
we take the faith of Jesus as our own, we take 
this fact also as one of ultimate reality, which 
encompasses us at every footstep of our way 



The Fact of God 119 

from birth to death, and onward into the 
unknown. Life may be clouded and stormy, 
as it was with Jesus, but over it all lies the 
benediction of God's presence, like the rain- 
bow of promise that one's heart leaps up to 
see. Whatever else there is that is real to 
us, and that absorbs our attention as we 
voyage onward through the years, this 
should be most real and most engrossing. 
It is the primary fact of consequence in all 
our life career. Nothing else will ever con- 
front us with such richness of joy or such 
depth of obligation. With Jesus, it seems not 
to have been so much an article of faith as a 
fact of consciousness, that never failed him 
night or day. He never argued for it any 
more than he argued for the sunlight; 
he lived in it and by it. It made him what he 
was; just as it should make us widely differ- 
ent from what we would be were this reality 
wanting in our lives. 

Obviously, such a faith is life's supreme 
possession. As children, we took it for 
granted, as the starting point for anything 
that could be called religion. It was a fact 
that had to be accepted whether agreeable 
or not; and perhaps more often than not it 
was a trifle unwelcome, as adding one more 
eye, and a sleepless one, to those that were 
already watching us. But now, as loneliness 
or the fear of it begins to cast its shadow over 



120 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

us, we know that to be watched in love is a 
joy that money cannot buy, and for which 
our hearts hunger beyond expression. And 
to be followed by a thoughtful love, of an 
almighty energy that cannot fail, is a blessing 
that transcends every other blessing known 
to man. A quiet confidence in this undying 
presence of our Father is the goal of faith 
and its supreme achievement, rather than 
its easy beginning. 

It is reassuring to remember that our need 
and our longing in this respect are not 
peculiar to us, as though we were somehow 
weaker or more credulous than our fellows, 
or as though we had the " religious tempera- 
ment " that seeks its gratification in at- 
tempted converse with the unseen. Jesus 
simply brought into the light of common day 
the eternal reality for which men have been 
groping so far back as we know anything of 
mankind. Men have always coveted the 
precious metals, and the workings of their 
abandoned gold and silver mines are found 
scattered up and down the earth wherever 
powerful civilizations have had their home; 
but the ruins of their temples, in what today 
are pathless jungles or sand-drifted deserts, 
tell of something they coveted far more than 
gold, and for which they sought with in- 
satiable eagerness — the presence and favor 
of the unseen God. If then we think of him 



The Fact of God 12 i 

with wishful desire that he would somehow 
make himself better known to us, we are but 
revealing our kinship with the great brother- 
hood of humanity, who have never been 
ashamed or afraid to admit their need of him. 
Jesus made known to us the reasons why this 
hunger lies so deep, — simply because, in 
very fact, God made us for himself and our 
hearts are restless till they rest in him. 

All of us are more or less intimidated by 
the waves of scepticism that roll over society 
from time to time, putting the spiritual in- 
sight of a Voltaire or a Haeckel before that of 
Jesus. The tide of agnosticism that set in 
fifty years ago, following the scientific re- 
searches of Darwin and his contemporaries, 
submerged confidence in Jesus on the part of 
so many in our time that we tend to forget 
how universal and how ineradicable is this 
immemorial instinct for God. We need, at 
such a juncture, to remind ourselves that the 
sense of God, like every most sensitive and 
highly developed capacity of the human 
spirit, can be easily dulled and even atro- 
phied. Jesus made this plain, from a single 
angle, when he said, " The pure in heart shall 
see God." Selfish or sensual indulgence 
will somehow make the fact of God grow 
dim and unreal, until arguments spring up 
on every side to show the unreasonableness 
of trust in him. As someone has said, in 



122 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

words that burn like fire, " The impure shall 
see all, except God." It is clear then, at the 
outset, that one's moral condition directly 
affects the power by which he discerns those 
realities that lay so open to the view of Jesus. 

But quite apart from any conscious moral 
failing, our capacity for faith seems to wax 
or wane with the vigor and health of our 
spiritual life. Professor Tyndall is quoted as 
saying, apropos of this haunting tendency 
to materialistic atheism, " I have noticed, 
during years of self-observation, that it is not 
in the hours of clearness and vigor that this 
doctrine commends itself to my mind; for 
in the* presence of stronger and healthier 
thought it ever dissolves and disappears, 
as offering no solution to the mystery in 
which we dwell and of which we form a 
part." There can be few persons who have 
been hounded by persistent doubt, but could 
confirm the truth of Professor Tyndall's 
words. As young people, we are apt to be 
afraid of our best instincts, distrusting their 
right to be heard and half fearing that 
they tempt us from the stern logic of the 
intellect; but as we grow older we come 
to know them better and to trust in their 
authority. 

Furthermore, alas that it should be true! 
mere preoccupation with work will deaden 
and stifle any of the most highly specialised 



The Fact of God 123 

capacities of our nature. Whether in the 
study, or physical laboratory, or business 
office, a man can become so absorbed, so 
indurated, in his persistent occupation, as 
to seem to have no consciousness left him of 
things unseen, nor any sense of need for 
them at all. It is to be remembered also, 
that our capacities and appetites reach far 
deeper than the consciousness of our common 
hours would plainly tell, in days of routine 
activity and contentment. One wonders 
how many of the men and women of our 
generation, under the outward appearance of 
intellectual contentment with agnosticism, 
are genuinely athirst for God. 

There is a passage of singular interest in 
the life of John Addington Symonds, the 
Oxford scholar and historian of the Italian 
renaissance. He was in some respects a 
typical product of his time, — a man of the 
highest culture, a lover alike of convivial 
society and of all that is beautiful in art, 
but a confirmed sceptic in things religious. 
He made no attempt, however, to conceal 
his restless desire for something more satisfy- 
ing than he had found. It chanced that 
once, in his later years, he had occasion to 
undergo chloroform anaesthesia for some 
trifling surgical operation, and that under the 
influence of the drug the veil of doubt fell 
away, as it were, from before his eyes. He 



124 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

writes of the incident as follows: '^ Suddenly 
my soul became aware of God, who was 
manifestly dealing with me. . • . I felt him 
saying: ' I led you, I guided you; I have 
suffered you to feel sin and madness, to ache 
and be abandoned, in order that now you 
might know and gladly greet me.' I cannot 
describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I 
gradually awoke . . . the old sense of my 
relation to the world began to return, the 
new sense of my relation to God began to 
fade. I suddenly leaped to my feet and 
shrieked out, ' It is too horrible,' — meaning 
that I could not bear this disillusionment. 
Then I flung myself on the ground and 
woke, calling out, ^ Why did you not 
kill me.^ Why would you not let me 
die.^' Is it possible that the inner sense 
of reality was not a delusion but an actual 
experience.^ It is possible that I felt in 
that moment what saints have felt, the un- 
demonstrable but irrefragable certainty of 
God." 

It would be easy to argue too much from 
this singular experience. It shows in striking 
fashion, however, how deep was the stifled 
hunger of his nature for that which he re- 
jected. And it is not wholly unreasonable to 
believe that, under the unaccustomed release 
of anaesthesia, the subconscious nature of the 
man welled up for a moment into victorious 



The Fact of God 125 

consciousness, and that in that brief tantaliz- 
ing vision, fading instantly, he saw the 
eternally abiding truth.^ 

The same experience has come in a differ- 
ent form to tens of thousands of the men who 
have been called to serve at the front in the 
Great War. They have suddenly found that 
their previous convictions have not taken 
account of the greater realities that underlie 
life and death, and have turned to God, not 
in a moment of "anxiety religion," not in 
the fear of death or to safeguard a possible 
future, but as children just awakened to 
their father's presence, who needed his 
blessing and who owed him a loyalty and 
love of which heretofore they had never 
thought. 

Even those who have looked on have 
wakened to the fact that a world in which 
God is not, is a world impossible. Witness 
that touching saying of the noted French 
author and academician, Henry Lavedan, 
who heretofore had only ridicule for those 
who pretended to faith in God. In his recent 
confession, published throughout France, 

*0ne is vividly reminded of the closing stanza of Thompson's 
" The Hound of Heaven ": 

**That voice is round me like a bursting sea: 

* Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 
I am He whom thou seekest! 
Thou d raves t love from thee. 
Who dravest me.' " 



126 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

are these closing words: '' How hard it is in 
this national cemetery to be an atheist! 
I cannot. I have deceived myself and you 
— you who have read my books and sung 
my songs. It was an insane delusion, a 
fearful dream. France, France! turn back 
to faith, to the most beautiful days. To give 
up God would be to lose all. I do not know 
whether I shall live in the morning, but this 
must I now say to my friends, . . . ^ Lave- 
dan does not dare to die as an atheist! ' 
Hell does not terrify me, but the thought 
presses upon me — a God lives and I stand 
far from him. My soul shall rejoice if I 
can experience the hour when upon my knees 
I can say: . . . ^ I believe in God! I be- 
lieve! I believe!' This word is the morning 
song of humanity. For him who does not 
know it, night remains." 

Surely we have no reason to let timidity 
shake our faith in the clear-sightedness of 
Jesus, as though only he and we were be- 
lievers in God, and all the wise world were 
passing by on the other side. The man who 
thousands of years ago cried out, *^ As the 
hart panteth after the water-brooks, so 
panteth my soul after Thee, O God," was 
as much our own brother in experience as 
though he spoke out of the midst of this very 
year of grace — and war. And he who said, 
'' Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, 



The Fact of God 127 

Lord, hear my voice," might have been own 
comrade to the men who have Iain wounded 
on the battlefields of Flanders. They and 
we alike are but experiencing what Jesus 
felt, when he left the village inns before day- 
break that alone in the quiet dark he might 
talk with God. 

It needs no reflection to perceive how pro- 
foundly such a faith must affect life at every 
turn. As the desert sun searches out with 
its warmth and light every crevice and 
cranny of the deep canyons in the mountains 
so this belief reaches to one's every thought 
and feeling and action, in any conceivable 
situation or emergency. 

Here is the reality that makes faith in God 
at once so inconvenient and unpopular in 
any easy-going society. If one could secure 
its benefits without running the risk of its 
intrusiveness, perhaps all men would welcome 
it. But no one may deceive himself at this 
point. Men instinctively turn away from a 
God whose presence would destroy their 
peace of mind. His interference with their 
business and pleasure would be intolerable. 
If such a one as he were to scrutinize their 
actions from day to day, assuming the right 
to remould their life according to his will, 
life, they think, would be an insupportable 
burden. 

And so we come to understand why it is 



128 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

that the world as we know it is by no means 
eager to accept the faith of Jesus. Our age 
has grown into the habit of eulogizing 
human nature, and apologizing for its short- 
comings, until the public is half persuaded that 
men only need to have the essential truths 
of religion presented unencumbered, to accept 
them willingly. Surely, we have had little 
acquaintance with society as it really is if w^e 
have not recognized the intense hostility 
to this central teaching of Jesus, on the part 
of innumerable men and women of every 
class. Their lives would be turned upside 
down by the continual intrusion of the right- 
eousness and love of God. If one has ever 
seen or felt the almost demoniacal hatred 
felt by those who pander to evil passions 
toward any who would interfere with the 
organization of their business, he has real- 
ized how men and women determined on 
wrong-doing feel toward a holy God who 
would thwart their purpose. They want no 
such heavenly Father. As Jonathan Edwards 
used to say to certain of his day, they would 
kill God if they could. We need be under 
no illusion as to the inconvenience and un- 
popularity of this faith in God, save as one 
desires, at his best and deepest, the triumph 
of God's will. We do not welcome antagonis- 
tic wills in places of authority, and the will of 
God is clean and true and righteous al- 



The Fact of God 129 

together. Only if our heart is right does it 
leap up with gladness to know it is the right- 
eous God who has made us for himself, and 
who shall yet triumph over all in our aifec- 
tions that resists him. 

As the fact of God becomes more real to 
us, two things that were ever present to the 
mind of Jesus concerning his Father become 
of necessity more vivid and significant to us 
also. First of all in his consciousness, against 
the dark background of human sin was the 
glory of the majesty of God's holiness. It 
is the God of eternal righteousness in whom 
we live and move and have our being. His 
righteousness is like the great mountains. 
Justice and judgment are the habitation of 
his throne. It is of no sort of use, then, for 
us to make headway in life by means of un- 
worthy or unscrupulous methods, as so 
many do in politics, in business, and in their 
professions. Any such steps, however out- 
wardly successful, will have to be retraced in 
shame and sorrow. There is no way out or 
through by such methods. Because this is 
God's world, such wilful ambitions can only 
lead to ultimate confusion and failure. All 
gains achieved in other ways than godly 
ways are losses, and must leave us poorer in 
the end. 

These things may be obvious to say, but 
they are the hardest things in the world to 



130 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

believe. Were they realized for a day only, 
they would transform society. Most men 
seem to believe that if they only push hard 
enough, and cleverly enough, they will win 
life's prizes. We forget that God rules, 
and that in his hands the masterful man and 
the man of genius for leadership are utterly 
subject to his righteous law, even though he 
were a king of men, with millions to do his 
bidding. " There is a way that seemeth 
right unto a man, but the end thereof are 
the ways of death,'' because it is righteous- 
ness that is on the throne to all eternity. 

It gives a solemn majesty to life to be as- 
sured that only truth and honor and justice 
have any chance of ultimate success. How 
well we know, e.g., the type of journalist or 
politician who seeks his party's gain by un- 
scrupulousness in argument, by misrepre- 
sentation and the stirring up of racial and 
sectional hatred, and all the sinister selfish 
methods of pretentious patriotism. His is 
a figure all too common. Yet how com- 
pletely all this would sink Into contempt if 
all believed that the honorable ways of God 
are the only ways that can lead to national 
welfare and private happiness and content. 
As pushing men once said in kingdoms now 
dead and forgotten, " Jehovah will not do 
good, neither will he do evil." He is not a 
factor in the case, men think. The size of 



The Fact of God 131 

the enemy's army, or the length of the op- 
ponent's purse, or the cleverness of the 
opposing lawyer, all these are to be con- 
sidered; but that the righteousness of one so 
unreal and far away as God should be 
seriously taken into account does not occur 
to them. 

Even Jesus was tempted to believe that 
the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
them could somehow be won on easier terms 
than those that seemed to be of God. Some- 
thing whispered in his ear and told him so. 
But it was a lie. Still it is a lie, — though 
every newspaper should echo it. The glory 
that is to be had by parting company with 
the righteous and compassionate God, 
whether for rulers or statesmen or common 
people like ourselves, is glory that will 
presently sink down like grass in the fire 
and be forgotten. We shall have wasted 
our ambitions and our struggles, because we 
forgot that this is God's world and that his 
righteousness is the law of all human welfare. 
To one who believes in Jesus this poor world 
is, in spite of all, a noble stage on which to 
play our part, because it is our Father's 
world and the dignity and glory of his great 
plans run through it all. He will not fail 
nor be discouraged till he has set judgment 
in the earth. 

A second fact, self-evident to the mind of 



132 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

Jesus and of immeasurable concern to us, was 
the Father's claim upon his children. Be- 
cause God is what He is, there is an eternal 
fitness and obligation that men should be 
lovingly loyal to him. The most reassuring 
and uplifting utterance that ever fell from 
the lips of Jesus was his endorsement and 
renewal of the ancient command, " Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy 
mind and with all thy strength." As life 
goes on, one comes to look upon this saying 
not so much as a command as a revelation 
of the glory of human nature. It is the royal 
charter of human nobility. It confirms, as 
no mere affirmation could, the fact that we 
are the sons and daughters of the Most 
High. 

Often we are overawed by the vastness of 
the material universe as it is unfolded by 
modern science. We seem lost in the infinite 
labyrinth of space and time, and the sport of 
blind forces too vast for human comprehen- 
sion. We are like the ephemera whose life 
is bounded by a summer day. We may even 
find it hard to take seriously our life and its 
microscopic interests, unnoticeable amid the 
swarming life of ages. And if we are trivial 
in our own eyes, how much more in the eyes 
of the Almighty With such thoughts we 
tend to grow yet more weak and cowardly 



The Fact of God 133 

and selfish, and the animal in us surges up 
to take control. 

But in the presence of Jesus we right 
ourselves as a vessel rights itself after a 
dangerous sea. We cannot face his calm 
dignity as a son of God among many breth- 
ren, or hear his call on us for filial loyalty 
to our Father in heaven, without recovery 
from panic fear. We may not wholly under- 
stand. We cannot grasp the marvel of an 
earthly life linked in an imperishable kinship 
of love with the Eternal Spirit. Neverthe- 
less, if we hold to any shred of confidence in 
Jesus, we cannot doubt our heavenly lineage. 
Had he argued for it, as though it were open 
to denial, the force of his words would hardly 
have been so strong. But he confronts us 
with what he declares to be the primary 
obligation of the human spirit, and lo and 
behold! it is nothing less than filial response 
to a Father's love. 

Scribe and Pharisee, publican and harlot, 
leper and criminal, on all alike he binds the 
burden of the first commandment, " Thou 
shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart." It is not only those who are born 
again who are ennobled with this royal 
command of grace. Bushman and Hottentot 
and savage slave. Christian philosopher and 
savant, all are comprehended under its sub- 
lime constraint. It is as wide as the human 



134 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

race. It proclaims us of absolute worth to 
God. Only love can claim love. And in 
the dark and cloudy day, when the world 
seems too heartless to hold any gospel worth 
the hearing, we take refuge and courage 
again in this first and great commandment, 
that Jesus must have dwelt upon with 
gladness. 

One of the popular endeavors of our day is 
the attempt to pare away and whittle down 
the requirements of religion until only so 
much is left as all mankind can unite upon 
without serious objection. But pare and 
whittle as we will, if we at all believe in 
Jesus, our utmost ingenuity in refining away 
the uncompromising features of the creeds 
leaves still unaffected this stark uncom- 
promising demand for what is hardest of all 
things to render — a genuine heart loyalty 
to the holy will of God. Given this, all 
good things of character will follow. But a 
less searching creed will not answer. 

Probably it is not best to inquire too curi- 
ously of ourselves how far we are rendering 
this genuine heart affection to our Father in 
heaven. The inquiry is too baffling and un- 
fruitful. We can easily see that Paul and 
Augustine and Saint Teresa and Thomas 
a Kempis truly loved God with a passionate 
devotion. We may have hoped, in earlier 
days, that our experience, too, might some- 



The Fact of God 135 

what follow after theirs. Only gradually 
does it dawn upon us that men and women of 
ordinary temperament can hardly hope to 
reproduce the experiences of those ardent 
souls who had a preeminent genius for relig- 
ion. We cannot justly expect to see the 
mystical glories that they saw, or to duplicate 
their rapture in the sight; any more than we 
can see in a painting what lies open to the 
artist eye of a Ruskin or Rossetti. A few 
fortunate souls seem to have a natural gift 
for loving. Unconscious of self, sympatheti- 
cally conscious of others, demonstrative, and 
able easily to express their deepest feeling, 
they brighten the world through which they 
go. But most of us who belong to the more 
phlegmatic northern races are staid, practical 
folk, unemotional, undemonstrative, clumsy 
to discern and still clumsier to express what is 
dearest or most sacred to our thought. We 
shall go limping a little all our life through 
the most holy places, because our spirits 
are not as refined as they should be of self- 
consciousness and arid intellectualism and 
worldly caution — because we are what we 
are, by temperament and training. And 
yet, it is to such unemotional and severely 
practical people that this command is given, 
to love God with all the soul. 

There is no guage for feeling except ac- 
tion, and by this alone can we judge ourselves 



136 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

or others with safety. As Professor James 
of Harvard has said, " Act faithfully, and 
you have faith, no matter how cold and 
dubious you feel." We must even let our 
feelings go at times, so little do they seem 
under our control. But as the same great 
psychologist has told us, '' By regulating 
the action, which is under the more direct 
control of the will, we can indirectly regulate 
the feeling, which is not." He who would 
love God has this plain guidance, that he 
should loyally seek to do God's will. " He 
that hath my commandments and keepeth 
them, he it is that loveth me," said Jesus. 
Many a man must win through the Christian 
life with not much more glow of emotion 
than comes from faithfully performing the 
daily routine of domestic and civic duty. 
Yet perhaps it is to some of these plodding, 
unpretentious souls that it will be said in 
that day '' He hath loved much." 

This, then, is what we see first of all as we 
look out across the years. Not the tragedy 
of millions of men swaying backward and 
forward in the agony of mortal strife, not the 
endless discord of social classes, nor the 
warring of insensate natural forces upon 
human happiness, nor any of the harsh 
realities that make men bitter or despondent. 
But first of all, and last of all also, we see God 
present in his world. This is the endless 



The Fact of God 137 

horizon that encircles all of life we shall ever 
know. Where God is, there is hope, and 
pessimism cannot come. Even though earth- 
quake should topple all of our little world into 
ruin, leaving us too stunned and dazed to 
have any consciousness of God remaining, 
we should presently awake to find ourselves 
in the hollow of his hand. It is not our faith 
that is imperishable, but his loving kindness. 
Yet even in our weakness we may rise to the 
moral grandeur of that ancient cry of triumph 
out of the storm, 

" Though the fig-tree shall not flourish, 
Neither shall fruit be in the vines; 
The labor of the olive shall fail, 
And the fields shall yield no food; 
The flock shall be cut off from the fold. 
And there shall be no herd in the stalls; 
Yet I will rejoice in Jehovah, 
_ I will joy in the God of my salvation." ^ 



iHab. 3 :17, 18. 



CHAPTER X 
The Divine Outlook on Man 

AS for the outlook of Jesus upon the 
world of men, whose ill-will cost him 
his life, it may be summed up in one golden 
word — love. And here even the best 
among us measurably part company with 
him. In spite of our awakened social con- 
sciousness and our eager philanthropies, we 
are compelled to recognize that human 
sympathies lag far behind the divine. At 
no point does the infinite more gloriously 
transcend the finite than at this, of love for 
the unlovely. Whatever may be our faith, 
we are obliged to confess, more sorrowfully 
as years go on, that our thoughts are not as 
his thoughts or our ways as his ways. Here 
and there our sympathies may be deeply 
engaged and we give ourselves for others' 
welfare with much inward satisfaction; only 
to be reminded, presently, that our altruism 
may be counted on within limited boundaries 
only, while our personal ease and comfort and 
social privilege are everywhere sure of our 
most jealous and generous consideration. 

If any one thinks that because the public 
opinion of today has become acutely sensitive 
to the wrongs of children in the mills, or 

138 



The Divine Outlook on Man 139 

shop-girls underpaid, or unorganized labor 
selfishly exploited, it has at last awakened 
to a true sense of brotherhood with men, let 
him consider its attitude to unpopular races 
whose interests seem to clash with ours — 
Mexico, for example. With all our insistence 
upon the rights of American citizens in that 
country, and the need of protection for 
foreign interests, and of punishing flagrant 
outrages against life and property, how many 
of our papers have shown any intelligent 
sympathy for the tens of millions of ignorant, 
downtrodden men and women and children 
in our sister republic, whose sufferings cry 
to heaven for pity. She is the less fortunate 
neighbor lying in distress at our very door, 
and yet for the most part those who voice 
popular sentiment seem scarcely to have 
noticed the appeal of her sufferings, much 
less to have regarded it with thoughtful 
and brotherly solicitude. As a people, we 
would appear to view the problem from the 
angle of unmitigated pride and selfishness, 
from which angle it is intractable Indeed. 
The undoubted peril of our national rela- 
tions with the Chinese and Japanese rests 
almost exclusively upon this same racial 
selfishness and arrogance. If this Is true of 
America, what shall we say of Europe with 
its intenser jealousies? It is not wholly 
strange that the famous Orientalist, Arminlus 



140 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

Vambery, as a despised Hungarian Jew, 
should say that in his long experience of the 
various reHgions of Europe and Asia he had 
found them all alike in their spirit of bigotry 
and all uncharitableness. 

Joseph Cook is quoted as saying that the 
last century had made of the world a neigh- 
borhood, and that it was for the coming 
century to make of it a brotherhood. Yet, 
in spite of its twentieth century enlighten- 
ment, Christendom gives little more than 
a contemptuous toleration to the Christian 
doctrine of fraternity. It is a principle that 
can grow only in the soil of unselfish love, 
and such divinely watered soil is rare and 
precious. Nevertheless, if we believe in 
Jesus, our outlook upon the world of men 
must tend more and more to be like his, and 
his outlook, beyond all mistake, was that of 
the elder brother. To be sure, this is divine. 
But it is not therefore unhuman, and he 
asked no less of his disciples than that their 
outlook should be as his own. It will take 
more than threescore years and ten to bring 
it within the reach of most of us; but our 
faith at least is his faith, and the love will 
follow after. Already it has transformed 
many of his followers, and though they would 
be the first to lament the poverty of their 
likeness to him, yet we revere their deep 
devotion to the welfare of their fellows every- 



The Divine Outlook on Man 141 

where — a devotion not born of class-con- 
sciousness, but of the consciousness of their 
Father's love. 

Many would-be leaders of thought in our 
day claim to have an exalted faith in men. 
But often, on examination, their faith is 
found to be shallow or sentimental or un- 
sound, because it does not take into account 
all the factors that are involved. But Jesus' 
faith in men was rooted in the deepest reali- 
ties of human existence, and could bear any 
strain put upon it, even that of outrage and 
death. 

It rested broadly upon two great concep- 
tions, that always kindled Jesus' imagina- 
tion to noble visions of the Kingdom yet to 
be — a Kingdom of God, yet a Kingdom 
made up of men. These were, the reality of 
God's Fatherhood over all mankind, and 
the reality of the human brotherhood that 
follows of necessity from that filial relation. 

Some of us may have had the feeling, still 
shared by the more conservative element in 
our churches, that the doctrine of the univer- 
sal fatherhood of God is more the outgrowth 
of human pride than of New Testament 
teaching. There are many who regard it 
with suspicion, as one of those complacent 
assertions due rather to the exuberance of 
our modern spirit of self-glorification than 
to any humble acceptance of Biblical truth. 



142 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

The teaching of the reformed churches for 
centuries has been that, outside of the circle 
of the elect, there is " no fatherhood, only- 
sovereignty." How ruthlessly this has been 
asserted and how relentlessly its implica- 
tions have been used to crush the bruised 
hearts that Jesus would have bound up, 
it is well that most of us have forgotten. 

There is an obvious confusion in the use 
of the terms that describe the relation of 
men to God, which gives color to this time- 
honored abridgment of man's birthright. 
Manifestly, not all men are '^ the sons of 
God by faith in Jesus Christ"; neither are 
all his children in the sense that " every one 
that loveth is born of God." Not all are 
the brothers of Jesus as declared by his 
saying " whosoever shall do the will of God, 
the same is my brother," nor have all '^ the 
right to become the children of God " that is 
given only to those who receive him. In all 
these cases, and in others that will occur to 
any careful reader of the New Testament, 
sonship and brotherhood are regarded as 
dependent upon a predominant moral kin- 
ship with the Father which multitudes do not 
possess. Manifestly, any actual and practi- 
cal sonship is of this moral character, and 
cannot be shared by those who definitely 
refuse for themselves the filial relationship. 

And yet while all this is true — constitut- 



The Divine Outlook on Man 143 

ing as it does the great tragedy of human 
existence — there is a majestic reality that 
underlies it, in which are the glory and the 
hope of all mankind. It is something far 
more intimate and significant than the fact 
that all men are the creatures of God, and 
that the divine immanence makes them, 
together with the birds and beasts and 
flowers, the manifestation of his life and 
power. All this is true. But any one who 
believes in Jesus must believe that something 
far greater than this is true. " Ideally and 
intentionally," all men are sons of God. 
Jesus never directly taught the universal 
sonship of humanity, but his whole mission 
assumes it as the basis of everything he said 
and did. 

He constantly used the fact of God's 
Fatherhood to illuminate human duties — 
duties that took no account of saint or sin- 
ner, of elect or reprobate, but that rested on 
all alike who shared the common mercies of 
God. It would seem clear as the light that 
he made no distinction among men in the 
heavy demands he laid upon them — the 
demand, first of all, for love toward their 
Father in heaven. Only love can claim love. 
And every word that Jesus spoke assumed 
that the sinners with whom he consorted were 
loved of God, and that, in spite of their sin, 
they owed everything to God because they 



144 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

were inalienably his sons and daughters still. 
They might be lost sheep, but they were the 
sheep of God, and not of the Wicked One; 
and it was God who was seeking them with 
great desire. The wastrel son might be 
blackening his father's name in Bohemian 
revelry in a far country, but his father still 
had him in his heart, and would watch for 
him patiently though days lengthened out to 
years. And so, although Simon's lip curled 
to see Jesus' courtesy to the vulgar aban- 
doned woman who followed him in to the 
feast, Jesus spoke to her as to a sister in 
God's holy household. Manifestly, he saw 
in men those made in God's image, for his 
own possession, able to understand and 
answer to his love with undying affection, 
and so of absolute and eternal worth to 
him. It is of little use disputing about 
terms, where the facts infinitely transcend 
the words with which we seek to connote 
them; but an unprejudiced reading of the 
story of Jesus' life will leave one in little 
doubt that the common fatherhood of God 
underlay all his attitude to men and his 
outlook upon society. 

This, then, is our faith, as we look out upon 
the world of men. It may sound common- 
place enough, to us who have had Christian 
training; but how like dynamite such a faith 
would be, in our society or any other, if it 



The Divine Outlook on Man 145 

were honestly held and faithfully acted on 
by any considerable number. 

The sacredness and absolute worth to the 
Almighty of every human life is a principle 
that our world has always regarded with 
disdain, when it has regarded it at all. The 
weak, the ignorant, the poor, have always 
been the spoil of the strong. It was not 
only the cultured Greek who was inhumanly 
cruel to those whom chance misfortune had 
reduced to slavery. The same inhuman con- 
tempt for human agony, and the same utter 
obliviousness to the rights of human person- 
ality, are to be found unchanged today in 
almost every land where the teaching of 
Jesus Christ has not come. And how many 
there are in England and America today, 
whom our Lord would first of all remind 
that it were better that a great millstone 
were hanged about their neck and they were 
cast into the depths of the sea, than that 
they should so amuse or profit themselves 
at the deadly cost of others' degradation. 
The exploiter of his fellows is not chiefly 
the capitalist, it is the selfish man, whether 
rich or poor, who allows his own passion or 
pleasure or profit to come before the welfare 
of his brother or sister. 

Thirty years of mingling among men 
should have taught us this at least, that it is 
of no use guiding ourselves in these matters 



146 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

by the conventions of society, or by what the 
public opinion of our day regards as allowa- 
ble. Our only safety is in honestly seeking 
the point of view of Jesus, rather than that 
of the dramatic or literary or journalistic 
authorities of the cultured world. Thus he 
was, in very truth, what every man of honor 
should scrupulously seek to be, " a brother 
to all women.'' And his outlook upon the 
tangled web of social relations was that of 
the Elder Brother of the family. By what 
right, in the court of last inquiry, are we 
free from such a sternly uncompromising 
solicitude for the honor and virtue of others.^ 
Moral degradation, and cancerous, corrosive 
self-indulgence in immorality make good 
copy for the journalist, and are the chosen 
material for much of the drama and litera- 
ture of our day. The contemplation of it 
furnishes agreeable diversion for much of the 
reading and theater-going public. No one 
supposes that this would yield an agreeable 
sensation if it were one of his own family 
whose shame and ruin he was regarding. 
But by what right are we freed from the 
moral brotherhood that Jesus felt, whose 
responsibility he never sought to evade or 
disown.^ 

A man of middle age, with a daughter of 
his own whose purity and wholesome happi- 
ness are of immeasurable value in his eyes. 



The Divine Outlook on Man 147 

should at least be able by sympathy to under- 
stand how Jesus would feel were he looking 
at the pretty chorus girls of some popular 
ballet. Granting instantly that some of 
them may be of as high character as the 
daughter of the most favored home, he will 
also grant that they live in a maelstrom of 
temptation, in which many of them will 
presently be sucked down to a cruel and disas- 
trous end. Not for all the world would he 
allow his own daughter to go that way. 
And yet society approves the getting of its 
amusement by the sensuous diversion that 
they offer. The man who looked out on the 
theatrical stage through the eyes of Jesus 
would be likely to see much of what it offered 
through a mist of tears. The boy who grew 
up with Mary his mother, in that family of 
girls as well as boys, was such a chivalrous 
and passionate defender of the home, and of 
its sanctities resting on mutual trust and 
honor, that we know all too surely how he 
would regard the infinite variations of the 
general theme of home degradation and de- 
filement that appeal to popular taste today 
through mind and eye and ear. A believer 
in Jesus should not be too squeamish to 
demand of himself how his Master would 
enjoy the tales, e.g., of de Maupassant, nor 
should he be too modern to shape his taste 
on lines that the Master would approve. 



148 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

It is a very ancient inquiry, how much is a 
man of more value than a sheep. But it is 
not out of date. There are wide areas of 
our modern world where a sheep is of more 
value still, because the market seems to be 
glutted with human lives, while of sheep we 
can never have too many. The absolute 
worth of each of these worthless human lives 
— because the sons and daughters of the Most 
High — is something that Jesus would see 
and feel and act upon as if by instinct. 
But there are not many of us with whom the 
belief has yet come to be much more vital 
than a theory to which we stand committed. 
If an unfortunately small and helpless people 
comes to stand in the way of Imperial Policy, 
then they have only themselves to thank for 
their practical extermination, as the most 
enlightened public sentiment of Germany 
decided in the case of the Herreros of South- 
west Africa. The many thousands of women 
and children w^ere swept away like insects 
by those who needed for themselves the lands 
these helpless ones infested, though the 
Herreros, like our own Indians, had been 
hereditary possessors of the soil for uncounted 
years. 

Many of us are shocked by such ruthless- 
ness as this, who yet bear with entire equa- 
nimity the fact that a million men and 
women in London today, 



The Divine Outlook on Man 149 

" In places infamous to tell, 
Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes," 

live with less of physical content and well- 
being than the average African, — as may 
be proved with piteous amplitude to any 
one who is curious enough to examine into 
the heart-sickening reality. Half of the 
American people, only sixty years ago, ac- 
cepted the Supreme Court ruling that their 
black neighbors had no rights that they were 
bound to respect; and until now there are 
multitudes of our fellow-citizens to whom 
it would never occur to respect the person- 
ality of colored man or woman. It is a 
pitiful thing, anywhere on the edges of 
Western civilization, to have to stand by 
and watch helplessly the insulting and con- 
temptous treatment meted out to self- 
respecting girls and young women of Eurasian 
or half-breed blood, — treatment which re- 
flects so relentlessly the valuation that we of 
the ruling race put upon those of lower race 
who have no helper. 

No doubt we turn away indignantly from 
such blasphemy as this against God's thought 
of sacred dignity for all men. But as years 
pass, and we come to know a little of all 
sorts and conditions of men, we realize that 
we, too, in our complicated industrial civiliza- 
tion, are in danger of using men's lives 
cheaply and thoughtlessly for our personal 



150 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

convenience. Polite and privileged society, 
in days not long gone by, has been con- 
tent to have the structure of its comfort 
reared on the inexcusable sorrows and hard 
labor of the poor and helpless. It seemed to 
them that such frightful inequality in op- 
portunity was an essential part of this sorry 
scheme of things, and they consented to see 
men used — and women and children, too — 
as we would never for an instant allow an 
animal to be used, under our authority. 
A hundred years ago, in England, when 
women and little children worked under- 
ground in the mines, under almost bestial 
conditions, there could always be found men 
of high position in State and Church, living 
in ease and refinement and luxury, who pro- 
tested violently against any interference with 
the labors of these pitiful victims on whom 
their own prosperity appeared to rest. 

To us of today it is all but unthinkable 
that presumably honest men should have 
looked out on the world with eyes so alien 
to the spirit of Jesus. And yet we, too, so 
long as our privileges are secure, are apt to 
listen only intermittently and with languid 
interest to the never ending story of the use 
of human lives as though they were only one 
of the raw materials of industry, to be con- 
served economically, like any other valuable 
commodity, but not to be regarded as mem- 



The Divine Outlook on Man 151 

bers of the family, meant to have a chance in 
God's own world at life's best things as much 
as we. We talk glibly of reform and social 
readjustments, but we do not easily or will- 
ingly come to see that any adequate readjust- 
ment is likely to abridge the rights and im- 
munities and comforts that we complacently 
regard as ours of necessity and by every 
propriety under heaven. The " rights " of a 
human soul, on its Father's broad rich earth, 
are something on which we are very slow to 
reflect, lest our conclusions should be incon- 
venient or bewildering. 

But the subject is one on which we must 
reflect, honestly and unafraid, if our outlook 
on life is to be that of disciples of Jesus. 
And we who have reached middle age are 
not ashamed to confess that we are still 
learning the first lessons as to that primary 
truth of the universal Fatherhood of God. 
We shall have gone but a little way in it be- 
fore life's lessons are over, simply because love 
is the hardest of all the lessons that life has to 
learn. 

We have reason to be deeply grateful 
that the world-wide labor of foreign missions 
is ever before our eyes, as a reminder of 
what the spirit of Jesus is, and as a gauge 
of the reality of our own professions of disci- 
pleship. The attitude of the average man 
toward such Christian knight-errantry re- 



152 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

fleets the deep-seated scepticism of our time 
as to the soundness of Jesus' position 
regarding our common heritage as God's 
children. On any steamer going to the Far 
East you may meet with so-called Christian 
men, staunch churchmen, who would be the 
strongest defenders of the value to their 
country of the established church and its 
teachings, who yet look with unconcealed 
disgust and contempt upon the men and 
women who are going out to China or India 
or Japan to carry those same teachings to the 
people of the East. " Jackass missionaries " 
Lafcadio Hearn called them. They still 
regard the whole enterprise, as did Sydney 
Smith, as the '^ most mad, useless, and 
dangerous project that could be devised." 
Claiming to regard the truths of Christianity 
as a very way of life for their own people, 
they naively assert that for the Oriental his 
own faith is good enough, — although for 
themselves they are quite convinced that 
Hinduism or Buddhism could lead nowhere 
but into the hopeless dark. 

It amounts to a flat denial of the essential 
brotherhood that comes from membership 
in the same family of the Heavenly Father 
and that makes the glad tidings of God's 
love of equal value and importance to every 
soul of man. There is behind it a sort 
of cynical denial — as from a standing of 



The Divine Outlook on Man 153 

ineffable superiority in God's sight — of the 
right of any backward race to share the 
spiritual birthright of the white man. If 
" the heathen in his blindness bows down to 
wood and stone," that is entirely his own 
affair; it seems suited to his intellectual and 
moral capacities, and there is little use in 
thrusting on his attention even those infinite 
and eternal truths that are of proven power 
to inspire and redeem all human life. 

The fact is that those who reason thus do 
not care to be troubled with the spiritual 
affairs of Hindus or Mongolians, any more 
than they care to be bothered with the domes- 
tic affairs of the Chinaman who does their 
washing. And certainly they do not esteem 
their own religion highly enough to make 
any sacrifice to share its benefits with other 
races. Sympathy and honest conviction 
seem about equally to be lacking. But for 
men who genuinely believe in Jesus Christ, 
a fair gauge of the reality of their faith in 
him is found in their sympathy with men 
and women on the far-flung battle-line of the 
church, where goes on silently and unap- 
plauded the never ending struggle to bring 
the love of our Heavenly Father into the 
hearts and homes of men. And all honest 
men are indebted to this world-wide labor of 
unselfish love for an inestimable incitement 
and stimulus to more Christian thinking 



154 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

as to the whole duty of man to men. There 
may have been for us a tinge of romance 
about missions when we were in our child- 
hood; but now that we are far on the road of 
the prosaic practicalities of life, and are 
pretty well disillusioned of merely theoretical 
altruism, we give humble thanks to God for 
this thrilling evidence that Christ is still with 
his servants, leading them to the ends of the 
earth with the message of his heavenly grace. 

It was a direct consequence also of Jesus' 
faith in the divine lineage of all men, that he 
treated them as capable of heroic things. 
He did not degrade them by asking only the 
minimum of courage and devotion on their 
part, as though they were unequal to a higher 
and sterner calling. He laid on them regal 
demands, because he knew that regally 
they could make answer — as they did. 
And if we believe in Jesus we, too, shall be- 
lieve in men — in their freedom of will, and 
their power of noble choice, and their proud 
superiority to enfeebling environment. 

Until the Great War came and set up a 
new standard of values in the appraisement 
of human capacity for sacrifice, it was a sign 
of our times that we were increasingly afraid 
to ask or expect hard things of men. Just in 
proportion as a generation grows soft in self- 
indulgence and luxury does it make sympa- 
thetic allowance for human weakness, until 



The Divine Outlook on Man 155 

it fears to suggest the heroic, and tries to 
smooth the path of duty at every point from 
childhood to old age, so that one may get 
on with fair credit even if he follows the path 
of least resistance — as we half assume that 
he must do. It does not like to hear about 
the " stern daughter of the voice of God," 
but prefers its own interpretation of the 
easy yoke and the light burden, adapting 
them to feeble wills and irresolute desires. 

All of us tend inevitably to grant this 
kindly dispensation to ourselves, and still 
more, and by consequence, to make our 
benevolent apologies for others. We are 
so impressed with the frailty of human na- 
ture that we treat it with exaggerated al- 
lowance for its defective heredity and its 
fatal leaning to self-indulgence. Judging 
by some of the most popular literature of 
our time, man is wholly animal — in a 
refined and romantic and extremely alluring 
way, of course — and is swayed by nothing 
higher than what is of the earth, earthy. 
Others look upon him as one in whom the 
ape and tiger are still in the ascendant, 
although higher impulses stir him from time 
to time and give rise to fitful but for the most 
part ineffectual struggles toward spiritual 
ends. 

But the bidding of Jesus, over against all 
this muddy obfuscation of man's true nature. 



156 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

stands out clear as a shaft of lightning against 
the summer night, ^^ Ye shall be perfect, as 
your Father in heaven is perfect." This 
was his divinely uncompromising challenge, 
based on what he saw to be the ultimate and 
eternal fitness of things. He asked un- 
hesitatingly for what only a child of God 
could give. Indeed, he asked for the im- 
possible, if we are to measure our possibilities 
by the brief uncertain career of the physical 
body. He was taking into consideration 
later stages of development than those with 
which we are most familiar, here under the 
sun. But even for these years of physical 
limitation, where one is beset on every hand 
by the earthly seductions to which our 
senses are so quiveringly responsive, where 
our ignorance and inexperience and imperious 
appetites plead for excuse and indulgence at 
every step of the way, Jesus asks for the 
heroic. 

He was not afraid to put self-denial in the 
forefront of his requirements upon his follow- 
ers. " If any man would come after me, let 
him deny himself, and take up his cross and 
follow me." He knew what stuff he had to 
deal with, and the proud principle of noblesse 
oblige lay behind all his invitations and in- 
junctions. Those commonplace, illiterate 
peasant-women of the villages, whom he 
knew so well, shut up to their pitiful little 



The Divine Outlook on Man 157 

horizon of Oriental pettiness and prejudice, 
he addressed as the daughters of the Most 
High God. That Samaritan woman at the 
well may have been as vain and tawdry as 
her reputation proclaimed her, but Jesus 
saw in her something that no other eye dis- 
cerned. He treated her with the considerate 
respect due to one born for high estate. 
She could rise up, even then, and return to 
her Father. 

If we believe in Jesus we shall believe in 
ourselves as well as believe in men. Believe 
in ourselves enough to bow our head humbly 
to a high destiny, that is to be achieved only 
through ways that we have no courage to 
choose or tread unaided; and believe in men 
enough to lay upon them unhesitantly the 
old heroic calling to give themselves to God, 
not counting the cost. We come to learn 
that the cheap and easy terms of discipleship 
are too cheap to fit our needs — even our 
preferences. 

Some churches in our day have been 
trying to see how broad and attractive they 
could make the way into the the Kingdom, 
so that none but the unpleasantly and aggres- 
sively reprobate could find excuse for staying 
without. They have appealed to the multi- 
tude by all the means that the multitude 
enjoys; by music, and sensational addresses, 
and dramatic readings, and moving pictures, 



158 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

and an almost complete absence of annoying 
or unpopular doctrines, or antiquated ap- 
peals for " decisions " as though the church 
were vulgarly seeking converts. But few of 
us can reach middle age without recognizing 
how paltry and unworthy it all is, and how 
inefficacious. 

O that the church everywhere dared emu- 
late its Master's faith in men, and boldly 
ventured to confront them with those life- 
and-death realities to which the most idly 
pleasure-loving hearts still vibrate; bringing 
men the clear call to repentance and forgive- 
ness, the promise of a cleansed heart and 
power for victorious living, and the summons 
to stand out openly shoulder to shoulder with 
the great army of those who would fain spend 
their life-capital, to its last red drop, for 
Christ and his Kingdom. Being made in 
the image of God, it is still the high calling of 
God to which men answer, and not the cheap 
and colorless Christianity of good form and 
respectable behavior. 

Thank God, also, that of us Jesus demands 
higher things than we should ever demand 
of ourselves. We should count ourselves 
presumptuous fools to set the mark as high 
as he has placed it for us. But he knows us 
better than we know ourselves, and he sees 
how he is to bring us through. We cannot 
see how he is to succeed with such materia} 



The Divine Outlook on Man 159 

as we have to offer. But we know that God 
has made us for himself, our sufficiency is of 
him, and some day — some day — we shall 
see what transfigured end he has all along 
been striving to bring to pass. Wherefore, 
with humble hope and joy, we take Christ's 
faith in men to be our faith* 



CHAPTER XI 
The Good Fight 

ANYONE who believes in Jesus comes to 
perceive, soon or late, that his life must 
be one of strenuous concentration on an all- 
absorbing aim. If he actually drinks in his 
Master's spirit he inevitably discovers how 
tremendous an issue life involves, and with 
what mortal earnestness this issue must be 
fought out. All else must be subordinated to 
it — every other interest of life must be viewed 
in relation to it. He must be a man of one 
idea, content to be called narrow and bigoted 
by men of a cultured catholicity of outlook 
not assertively Christian. He must be able 
to say with Paul, " One thing I do," and to 
do it, with a resolution that bends every- 
thing to the attainment of his purpose. 

As life goes on, we come to be weary with a 
great weariness of the dilettante type of 
Christianity that prevails throughout Chris- 
tendom, and that saps the life-blood of the 
church of God. The passionate enthusiasm 
of Jesus for a great spiritual end, it shuns 
with unmistakable genuineness of aversion, 
seeking for a polite and tolerant breadth of 
view as to all of life's problems, that shall be 
as unlike as possible to his unsparing inten- 

160 



The Good Fight 161 

sity of conviction. There is no sort of 
question that Jesus in the flesh would fit in 
extremely ill with our canons of a cultured 
tolerance, that can see all sides of a moral 
or religious question so sympathetically as 
not to be stubbornly insistent upon any one 
of them. 

He had no fear of appearing fanatical 
or harsh in his opinions, simply because of 
the iife-and-death seriousness of the condi- 
tions he was confronting. The modulated 
tones of voice that are suitable for the quiet 
of the classroom are quite forgotten when one 
is facing the elemental passions of the crowd 
on a sinking ship in mid-ocean. One learns 
then how stern and peremptory the tones of 
a human voice may be, and how reassuring 
for their very sternness. And Jesus was 
face to face with those elemental needs and 
perils of the soul. Our outlook on life must 
somehow be brought in harmony with him 
who said to his nearest friends, " If thine eye 
cause thee to stumble, pluck it out and cast 
it from thee,'' and, " If any man would 
come after me, let him deny himself and take 
up his cross and follow me." We remember 
how many other utterances there were of 
like tenor. 

Unless there is actually a sweet reasonable- 
ness behind this austere conception of the 
gravity of life's struggle, these utterances are 



162 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

those of a fanatic — one little suited to be 
the Guide and Master of our refined society 
of today. Only the utter truth of his moral 
perspective and of his scale of values could 
justify such a view of life, or make it har- 
monious with his gentle and kindly spirit. 
But if life really is so intense a struggle, for 
an end of inestimable value, then must we 
cleave to our Leader still, satisfied that his 
uncompromising way is the way of life and 
truth and joy. We take for ourselves his 
unrelenting simplicity of aim. 

There can be no doubt regarding life's 
supreme issue as Jesus saw it — it is the 
question whether a man will choose God's 
will or no. Its struggle is the struggle for 
character, in spite of the world, the flesh and 
the devil. A thousand forces pull us down — 
the voice of God calls us upward. It is 
a goodly fight — the fight to which all the 
sons and daughters of God are called. But 
in the very nature of the case it must have 
first place in all one's scheme of living. All 
our judgments of what is wise or expedient 
in conduct must be determined in the light 
of this supreme consideration. As Henry 
Drummond said, '' Probably most of the 
difficulties of trying to live the Christian 
life arise from attempting to half live it." 
And at this point, the experience of years 
has much to teach us. 



The Good Fight 163 

One does not need to live very long among 
men to realize that this gathering up of all 
one's energies upon a single over-mastering 
moral purpose — that of being in all things a 
hearty disciple of Jesus Christ — is exceed- 
ingly distasteful to the majority, even the 
majority of professing Christians. It lays 
life under too sharp a restraint. It is in 
bad form, it is narrow and puritanical, it is 
old-fashioned and out of touch with present- 
day breadth of view, it is pretentiously 
pious, and in any case it is impractical and 
impossible. No objection is made to one's 
joining the church and making a profession 
of religion if he wishes to do so; but to sub- 
ordinate all one's opinions and practices to 
the test of their suitableness to a heavenly 
calling, and to set up such a standard as this 
for society, is nothing more nor less than 
fanatical. In any case, the ordinary man or 
woman cannot be supposed to accept and 
abide by any such conception of life's mean- 
ing. 

Certainly it would be rash to expect it of 
them except as they believe in Jesus. But if 
one believes in Jesus, how in the sight of God 
is he to shape his life on any other plan.^ How 
can he escape the vivid intensity of moral 
earnestness that characterized his Master.^ 
If our Christian purpose is flabby and half- 
hearted and readily adjustable to all the 



164 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

opinions and practices of polite society, it is 
manifest that we are but mechanical and 
unsympathetic followers of him who said: 
" My meat and drink is to do the will of Him 
that sent me.'' And that there is an enor- 
mous volume of such characterless Christian- 
ity, no one who has seen much of the Chris- 
tian church in different lands can doubt. 
There is a fight for wealth, a fight for scholar- 
ship and reputation and power, that is recog- 
nized as suitable and proper for men in any 
walk of life. But the fight for an uncom- 
promising loyalty to the spirit of Jesus Christ 
is distinctly not in good form for a scholar 
or a gentleman. The man who adopts it is 
certain to be in the way. He does not fit in. 
He is an awkward member of society. His 
enthusiasms and his conscientious objections 
are too pronounced. He might do for the 
times of Calvin or Cromwell, but he is an 
anachronism in ours. 

Yet as life goes on we are compelled more 
and more to recognize that a worthy disciple- 
ship of Jesus means everything or nothing. 
If it is not thoroughgoing, it is in some re- 
spects a pitiful make-believe. And if it is 
thoroughgoing, it must needs challenge every 
seductive allurement and every gracious 
invitation of life by the test of their suitability 
to the great endeavor. We have set out to 
be Christ's faithful soldiers and servants to 



The Good Fight 165 

life's end. It is a plain path of privilege and 
joy. But how one may achieve it without 
giving him first place and guiding every 
energy of life by the supreme consideration 
of his will, who can tell us ? It would be like 
telling one how to achieve the rewards of 
victory by cowardly retreat. Jesus evidently 
saw no other way than that of unqualified 
fidelity to himself. " He that loveth father 
or mother more than me is not worthy of 
me." And if we have really caught his 
spirit we shall bend everything to the great 
end of success in the good fight. We shall 
make our own the old Methodist prayer, 

" To serve the present age, 
My calling to fulfil, 
O may it all my powers engage 
To do my Master's will." 

To listen to many exponents of art and 
literature in our day one would suppose that 
culture had quite superseded self-restraint, 
and that such a thing as rigorous self-denial 
for a high end was crude and Philistine. 
Denial of self in things that are vulgar, yes! 
But self-denial in things that society ap- 
proves, or that a man of the world is sup- 
posed to be familiar with! Why should one 
set himself up to be so puritanically superior 
to his fellows ? And yet if Christ the Lord is 
our Lord, and we have engaged to fight the 
good fight under his direction, can we fail 



166 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

to deny ourselves the things whose influence 
rises like a fog between ourselves and him 
and shuts him from our gaze? 

An English friend once found Jenny Lind 
sitting by the seashore with an open Bible 
on her knees, gazing at the sunset. " Ma- 
dame Goldschmidt," said her friend, '' how 
did you come to abandon the stage at the 
very height of your success?" ''When 
every day," Jenny Lind replied, '' made me 
think less of this " (laying a finger on the 
Bible) '' and nothing at all of that " (pointing 
to the sunset), '' what else could I do? " 

Of course it is open to any one to say that 
she should have felt differently. But feeling 
as she did, could she on any other terms keep 
in the divine fellowship of Jesus Christ and 
his faithful soldiers and servants? It would 
be far otherwise could we regard Christianity 
as a pleasant garnishment of life, that en- 
hances every pleasure and detracts from 
none. But Christianity is not a garnish of 
life's pleasures, but a very way of life itself; 
and it holds to its high purpose whether 
pleasures come or go, knowing that it is the 
only way at once of righteousness and joy. 
The fight for character is the good fight. 
And as there is no such leader in the fight as 
Jesus, so the fight for character under his 
leadership is the supreme task of every pro- 
fessing Christian. 



The Good Fight 167 

We may as well grant at once that this is 
individual and personal in a high degree. 
It is personal and not social religion with 
which we are first of all concerned, and in the 
nature of the case it must needs be so. To 
do the will of God is our first concern. This 
will is largely concerned with our social 
duties, but it is only our own personal victory 
over sin and self that brings an adequate 
performance of these duties within our reach. 
Our own day is in acute need of plain speak- 
ing at this point. Our young people espe- 
cially have been led to suppose that the first 
duty of man is to be beneficently busy about 
other people's business, almost irrespective 
of whether one's own life is cleansed and 
saved by God's love or not. 

A noted sociologist has said that to en- 
deavor to render social service without deep 
religious convictions of one's own, is like 
tying a bunch of living roses on a dead stalk. 
In the long years of a lifetime our strictly 
social activities are likely to occupy but a 
tithe of our energies. It is the sum total of 
our conscious life that matters. Now and 
again through life some of us will be privileged 
to have direct access to human need in such 
a way as will give a chance for a noble 
ministry of love, provided we have the grace 
of self-forgetfulness; and many of us may 
have opportunity from time to time to aid 



168 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

the fight for social reform along many lines. 
But day by day and night by night, in sick- 
ness and in health, at home or abroad, alone 
or in the midst of the crowd, as children and 
in old age, we shall be summoned to the good 
fight for a transparent loyalty to Jesus Christ. 
At its heart the good fight is as intensely 
personal as the innermost depths of our 
own spirit, with which no man may inter- 
meddle. 

No prophet in our day has had deeper 
social sympathies than Count Tolstoi, and 
yet perhaps no one has stated so clearly as 
he the essential fallacy of supposing that one's 
primary concern is to help others, when the 
battle of his own life is far from being fought 
out. He speaks with sharpest irony of 
those who feel, since they are so intelligent 
and worthy, that " their vocation and sacred 
duty is to enlighten, organize and direct the 
lives of others." " Every day," he says, 
" I get letters from young high-school girls 
who ask me naively to whom they ought to 
do good by communicating their wisdom and 
their kindnesses. The only good work for 
a man is to live according to God. The man 
who lives thus, whose principal aim it is to 
increase in his own soul love for his neighbor 
and to free himself from his own vices and 
bad tendencies, will not be in such a hurry 
to enlighten others. Today the disease 



The Good Fight 169 

seems to Infect everybody. The remedy will 
come only when men are awakened from 
this hypnotic epidemic, and will at last 
understand that the amelioration of the 
state of society can be brought about only 
by the amelioration of the individuals in this 
society, and that man can act with success 
only on himself." 

This is not wholly pleasant doctrine, even 
when we do not push it so far as Tolstoi 
was inclined to do. Any one who knows our 
colleges today knows that " personal relig- 
ion " is a disagreeable and avoided sub- 
ject; but nothing is more popular than the 
discussion of our neighbor's religion, or of 
the ways of improving it and of uplifting the 
depressed strata of society. It is easy to 
see the strenuous contest that is going on 
there, and it is easy and pleasant to engage 
in it at a distance in imagination. But to 
face the stern exigencies of one's own soul 
in utter faithfulness is something from which 
we shrink instinctively. After all, the grav- 
est perils that beset society are apt to be the 
same ones in essence that threaten our own 
manhood, and the struggle to be fought must 
first be fought out in our own souls. The 
first contribution to society, that we are in 
honor bound to pay, is the contribution of 
our own selves, honorable and unstained and 
victorious over temptation. 



170 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

Certainly one of the most insidious perils 
of our time is the hunger for relaxation and 
amusement. Our forefathers lived in what 
would seem to us a dull gray monotony of 
routine, without vacations, without sports, 
without any exciting or highly spiced amuse- 
ments. As life during this last fifty years 
has steadily speeded up, until the pace is 
now hurried and the strain of it racking to 
the nerves, our present generation is ever 
more clamorous for amusement that really 
amuses, for excitement, for stimulation, and 
— almost equally — for relaxation and at 
least momentary relief from worry. Never 
was the temptation to the use of drugs, both 
stimulant and narcotic, so appealing as it is 
today. To be at ease for a little, to enjoy 
high spirits for an hour or two at night after 
a weary day, to drift through pleasant dreams 
instead of being harried by care — men 
thirst for relaxation such as this with a 
feverish thirst, and will pay a high price 
in physical or moral danger in order to 
obtain it. Not one of us is exempt from 
the need of a searching self-restraint at this 
point. 

How many of us who are now middle-aged 
men have fought through every stage of the 
argument for and against the use of alcohol 
as polite society uses it. We could not join 
in any public movement to rid society of the 



The Good Fight 171 

curse of drink until we had first fought out 
for ourselves the question of the pleasant 
indulgence in a little stimulant when it 
seemed agreeable and beneficial. We had 
to impose an unyielding restraint upon our- 
selves before we could honestly seek to lay 
hated restrictions upon the pleasures of 
others. And yet how clearly we now see 
that the stern restriction is necessary for 
society's greater good. 

The need of rigorous principle that shall be 
honestly loyal to the will of Jesus Christ is 
yet more apparent in the struggle for a clean 
life for ourselves and others. There can 
be little doubt that the coming generation is 
threatened with a wave of perilous and 
hitherto unequalled laxity at this point. 
The demand for stimulation of the senses is 
making itself felt here as nowhere else. The 
peril to our young people from alcohol is as a 
bagatelle in comparison. To keep a pure 
heart and an unstained imagination is likely 
to grow increasingly diflBcult from year to 
year. The pressure for more license is seen 
in our magazine literature, in our current 
works of fiction, in our popular art, in the 
very rapid increase in the suggestive and 
objectionable element in the '' movies," in 
the type of dancing most in vogue, in dress 
and manners, and in the increasing impatience 
of any criticism or restriction upon im.- 



172 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

modesty or refined indecency. It requires 
courage even to speak out honestly for the 
rights of the soul against the seductions of the 
flesh. 

No one likes to be accused of priggishness 
or hypocrisy, or to be called Pharisee or 
Philistine; and yet no one may give faithful 
heed to the high call of the good fight and 
hope to escape condemnation for his squeam- 
ish narrowness. To put God first, even at 
the cost of a stern denial of sensual gratifica- 
tions that blind the eye of the soul, demands 
of any college man today a heroic struggle. 
And yet how can one pretend to be honest 
as a follower of Jesus, and yet deliberately 
expose himself to temptations of eye and ear 
that sting and burn, and cling to memory and 
imagination like the poisoned shirt of Nes- 
sus. Such minor temptations fairly tread 
on each other's heels in these days, when all 
bars are down and one's choice of recreations 
may lead him where he will. 

Perhaps in nothing else does mature life 
lead one to clearer principles of self-limita- 
tion than in this respect. We have learned 
something of God and more of men. We 
understand something of our Father's yearn- 
ing for sons and daughters of pure heart and 
unstained honor, as members of his house- 
hold; and we have learned even more of the 
relentless and almost savage sternness with 



The Good Fight 173 

which nature scourges all self-indulgence 
and degeneracy in its later stages. 

The mere fact of parenthood has perhaps 
taught us more than all else, bringing a wel- 
come even if tardy wisdom as to the exacting 
terms of the good fight for noble manhood. 
There is hardly a passage in modern litera- 
ture more pathetically full of interest and 
instruction than the unconscious self-revela- 
tion in the later letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 
touching the effect of fatherhood on his 
Bohemian spirit. Partly of Greek blood 
himself, Hearn was like a reincarnation of 
the pagan spirit, in his love of beauty for 
its own sake, untrammeled by any scruples of 
religion or morality. He rebelled fiercely 
against the restraints on freedom of life in a 
so-called Christian civilization. He went to 
Japan in middle life partly to escape this 
puritanical interference with natural living 
and to steep his soul at once in pagan freedom 
and in art. He became a Buddhist and 
married a Japanese wife. But after his 
little son was born, whom he devotedly 
loved, the whole world began insensibly to 
change its aspect. Love began to rearrange 
his perspective of life's values and to make 
him afraid, for his child's sake, of the license 
which he had so strenuously demanded for 
himself. 

" Don't have children," he wrote to a 



174 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

friend, " unless you wish to discover new 
Americas." " I am now beginning to think 
that really much of ecclesiastical education 
(bad and cruel as I used to imagine it) is 
founded upon the best experience of man 
under civilization. Many things I used 
to think superstitious bosh, and now think 
solid wisdom." He speaks of his resentment 
against certain diversions in which he used 
to find pleasure. " I can't look at a number 
of (a salacious French journal) without 
vexation, almost anger. I can't find plea- 
sure in a French novel written for the obvious 
purpose of appealing to instincts that inter- 
fere with perception of higher things than 
instincts. You see how absurd I have be- 
come, — and this without any idea of princi- 
ple about the matter, except the knowledge 
that I ought to avoid everything which does 
not help the best of myself — small as it 
may be. . . . The best part of my life has 
been wasted in wrong directions, and I shall 
have to work like thunder till I die to make 
up for it." 

It was not religion but the heart principle 
of religion — unselfish love — that made him 
accept for himself and his family the neces- 
sity of a rigorous restraint in the eff'ort for 
character. It sadly interfered with the 
poetry and romance of a life dedicated 
primarily to the beautiful, but he saw no way 



The Good Fight 175 

of escape from the relentless law enunciated 
by Jesus Christ, " He that loveth his life 
loseth it." His earlier scheme of life, based 
upon self-pleasing and self-expression without 
reference to higher ends, led only to moral 
poverty and barrenness; and because he 
coveted a worthier life for those he loved, 
he would lay on them the restrictions 
that he had repudiated for himself with 
scorn. 

The love of one's own flesh and blood is a 
marvellous corrective for feeble or self- 
indulgent principles. But the honest love of 
God simply makes havoc of a pseudo- 
tolerance that is really rooted in a careless 
indiff'erence to our neighbor's good. If our 
loyalty to Jesus Christ is sincere, if his love 
genuinely constrains us, we shall be heartily 
afraid of those thoughts and sights and 
sounds that poison his life in men, and 
degrade or defeat the highest aspirations of 
the spirit. 

The supremacy of a fighting purpose as- 
serts itself not only negatively, against the 
things that it refuses, but positively, in its 
eager use of every aid that builds up life. 
A man who believes in Jesus will show the 
measure of his earnestness by the use he 
makes of the helps to spiritual conquest, 
that the long experience of struggling men 
and women has found to be actually life- 



176 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

saving in their efficiency. It is a mere 
pretense to claim a genuine discipleship of 
Jesus and yet disregard or neglect those 
means of clearer vision and closer fellowship 
that lie just at one's hand. The innumerable 
Christians who habitually dull the eye of the 
soul with self-indulgence, and at the same 
time refuse to allow their moral sight to be 
revived by adequate worship or reflection, 
proclaim to all the world that they do not 
take seriously their profession of disciple- 
ship of Jesus Christ. The struggle for self- 
preservation in the natural world is instinc- 
tively supreme; in the spiritual world there 
is also a struggle for self-preservation equally 
instinctive and peremptory in its demands, 
if only the voice of the soul be not stifled by 
material things. 

What shall a modern man do with Sun- 
day.^ Shall he pretend to " keep " it, as 
though it still held its former place of im- 
portance? If he is not making a sorry jest 
of the spiritual life, he will not only pretend 
to keep it, but he will keep it in fact, with 
the same unmeasured determination with 
which he keeps life itself. The instinct of 
self-preservation, if he is in earnest, will save 
him from all foolish obfuscation of the real 
issue, and will compel him to recognize in 
that day of rest and worship a day of de- 
liverance for the soul. 



The Good Fight 177 

It is worth while to pause a moment upon 
this matter, because it is illustrative of 
many other questions of practical Christian 
living. The ordinary lad, just emerged from 
dependence upon others' guidance, is likely 
to ask himself in this life of the good fight, 
What must I do? and, What must I not do? 
as though some external dictation of author- 
ity were to be looked for in all matters of 
large importance. Alas! we have no tables 
engraved on stone, which we may consult to 
see what is or is not allowable. But we have 
a law of life, written in our very being, which 
impels us — above every other earthly con- 
cern — to press on, if so be we may lay hold 
on that for which we were laid hold on by 
Jesus Christ. If we are pressing on to that 
majestic consummation we shall find guid- 
ance, clear as a bugle note in a charge, to 
let us know what we may and what we may 
not do with safety. 

And the demand for a day of rest and re- 
freshment for the soul, hard pressed by the 
accumulated cares and pleasures of the week, 
is written broadly across the face of human 
experience. No man will allow himself to 
be slowly asphyxiated with poisonous gas 
if he is in his right senses. But men will 
suffer their spiritual life to be fairly suflFo- 
cated with the deadly pressure of worldly 
interests, by refusing that breathing spell for 



178 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

the soul which a well-spent Sunday surely 
means. 

They say, " The Jewish Sabbath is dead." 
It is dead! It died with the early church, and 
was only resurrected for a time — in an 
incongruous and alien form — by the Re- 
formed Churches. There is no danger that 
it will ever be revived, save for those who 
insist on keeping the Seventh Day for the 
reason given in the fifth commandment. But 
the early church adopted a new day, the first 
day of the week, as a day of joy and gladness 
for the soul, sacred to the highest interests 
of the spirit. It was to be a day of rest, as 
the Sabbath had been, — a divine benedic- 
tion upon a wearied race of workers. It has 
passed through innumerable vicissitudes, 
but never has the need for it been so great as 
at this day, and never has the recognition 
of society's need of its weekly uplift been so 
world-wide as now. Continental legislation 
in the last twenty years bears witness to 
this fact. 

But we shall look in vain for direction as 
to how we are to observe it. The Bible 
does not tell us. The church will not com- 
mand us. We are quite at liberty, if we 
choose, to make selfish use of its opportunities 
or to refuse them altogether — as a drowning 
man may push away the white circle of the 
life-belt that has been thrown him from a 



The Good Fight 179 

steamer. But the very instinct of self- 
preservation will lead one to seize upon it if 
he is in earnest about living. 

The pressure of business and pleasure is 
now unprecedently keen. It largely swal- 
lows up the quiet home hours that used to 
give a little breathing space for thoughtfulness 
and spiritual renewal. Always the demand 
is for more time for work, and more chance 
for pleasure. Unless one resolutely resists 
the pressure, he finds his Sundays swallowed 
up by the same insatiable interests that de- 
mand the other six days of the week. And 
he will pay the price in the gradual atrophy 
of the noblest faculties of his soul. " There 
is a little plant in my soul called reverence," 
said Oliver Wendell Holmes, " which I like 
to have watered about once a week." But 
if one does not water it, presently it wilts 
and withers away. The very faculty by 
which we lay hold on God grows numb and 
unresponsive. 

This is not a matter of theory or of pious 
affirmation. It is a matter of experience, 
as undeniable as the decay of physical powers 
under long disuse. All men are more or less 
conscious of the fact. They may deny it 
stubbornly in times of moral sluggishness 
or self-complacency, but any quickening of 
spiritual sensitiveness or concern reveals it 
to them beyond chance of controversy. To 



180 Faith of a ]\Iiddle-Aged Man 

be careless of Sunday^ trifling as the test 
may seem, is to be dishonest with God. 
It is to push from us a minister to life, when 
we are professing to fight the good fight for 
life eternal. A supreme purpose to know and 
do God's pleasure will make a man fight for 
the means of grace to his own soul and the 
souls of his fellows, as an army fights to 
protect the lines of communication for itself 
and its allies. 

The same holds true of Bible-reading, or 
of prayer, or of some line of definite altruistic 
service, or any other way of moral renewal and 
invigoration that cannot be neglected with- 
out loss. To be a believer in Jesus is to be a 
man of intense convictions and resolute 
practice along all these lines, because one 
simply cannot be honest with his Master 
and yet neglect these primary obligations of 
the soul. 

'' One thing I do, I press on." When such 
a purpose has behind it the momentum of 
thirty or forty years of conscious determina- 
tion, persevered in through weakness and 
temptation and rebuffs of bewildering vari- 
ety, it should certainly make one sensitively 
alert to the fundamental strategy of the long 
campaign. And there is one strategic princi- 
ple concerning this fight for spiritual self- 
possession which grows ever clearer through 
the years, as one of inexpressible importance. 



The Good Fight 181 

It was nobly put by the Italian patriot 
Mazzini: '' If ever you have a strange 
moment of religious feeling, of supreme res- 
ignation, of quiet love of humanity, of a 
calm insight of duty, kneel down thankful, 
and treasure within yourself the feeling 
suddenly arisen. It is the feeling of life." 

The moments of spiritual illumination 
are the strategic opportunities of the soul 
to press forward and take possession of new 
ground. There are moments, we well know, 
when under provocation the lower passions 
surge up into consciousness and for the time 
being almost hold us at their mercy. We 
could commit our wills at those instants to 
actions or choices that would intimidate and 
weaken our better selves for long afterwards. 
They are crises of danger, menacing the life 
of God in our hearts. Even a lad has learned 
this much from experience. But we are 
slower far to recognize that there are also 
moments of moral ascendency, when we are 
lifted up as by a higher tide than common 
of spiritual life and purpose. Our insight is 
more clear; mind and heart concur in ap- 
prehending the will of God, and in responding 
to the graciousness of his love. 

These are the strategic moments for ad- 
vance — for consolidating the tentative gains 
of the past and for crystallizing into inflexible 
determination resolves that have never yet 



182 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

gone further than wistful aspiration. There 
is no ecstatic vision or tumultuous emotion. 
Never were we more perfectly possessors 
of ourselves in quiet reasonableness of spirit. 
It is simply that we are at our best, as we 
well know that in other moments we were at 
our worst. The veil between us and our 
Father hangs lighter than on common days. 
We can discern His will. 

In earlier days we may have been distrust- 
ful of these moments, as though there was 
about them something suspicious or unreal; 
as though, forsooth, our real selves appeared 
in the times of passion or temptation, while 
these rare occasions of sensitiveness to a 
divine impulse were somehow mere surface 
ebullitions of emotion. Only as the years 
pass and we begin to grow old do some of us 
learn at last that the divine in us is as truly 
of our inmost selves as the inheritance of 
the ape and tiger, and that our hearts in- 
evitably cry out for God at times so that we 
cannot choose but listen. It is when we are 
most sensitive to God's voice that we are 
most ourselves, and those are the golden 
moments of opportunity that we must seize 
upon and utilize for decision or for action 
before the preoccupation with lesser things 
surges in again upon our spirits. " It seems 
to me," says Phillips Brooks, " there is no 
maxim for a noble life like this : Count always 



The Good Fight 183 

your highest moments your truest moments. 
Believe that in the time when you were the 
greatest and most spiritual man, then you 
were your truest self." 

To believe in Jesus is to believe whole- 
heartedly in the good fight — not only in 
the fighting but in the winning. That there 
is a contest is obvious enough; that success is 
to be its issue is not so evident. Yet for 
faithful disciples of Jesus Christ there can 
be no hesitancy as to the outcome. Re- 
pulses and failures by the way there may well 
be; but the final issue is assured. And he 
who has in his heart this divine invitation and 
assurance will be under a powerful constraint 
to go determinedly forward. He cannot rest 
content with spiritual mediocrity — the 
mediocrity that tarnishes the true glory of 
the Church of Christ. He cannot be one of 
those lukewarm followers who break down 
the high spirit of their comrades by their 
indifference. As Owen Wister has said, 
through the mouth of the " Virginian," 
" A middlin' doctor is a pore thing, and a 
middlin' lawyer is a pore thing; but keep 
me from a middlin' man of God." 

It is a shame that some of us should reach 
middle age as " middling " Christians. The 
need of our generation, as of all generations, 
is for men who have a passion for Jesus Christ 
and for his Kingdom — not a cool academic 



184 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

approval of his ethics, but a personal loyalty 
to him, fused with a gratitude and love re- 
freshed each day. They will be marked men. 
But it is marked men w^e need beyond all 
power of expression. Not only men of 
principle, but men of spiritual enthusiasm, 
who see by faith so vividly the victory Christ 
brings that they cannot be otherwise than 
devoted to him and to his gospel. If a 
man has it in him to be a burning and a 
shining light, it is a tragedy if his light burns 
so dim as barely to illuminate his own soul. 
It is piteously easy to disparage Billy Sun- 
day; but if some of his flaming intensity of 
earnestness were diffused through the rank 
and file of our churches, what wonders of 
transformation we should see. Too many 
Christian lives are like an unfeathered arrow, 
wavering, ineff'ective, uncertain of their 
mark. But to believe in Jesus is to have 
one's life feathered by a God-given ambition, 
that carries it swift and straight to his goal, 
whatever that may be. 

Anywhere along the edge of the Sierras in 
Southern California you may come upon the 
power-houses for developing electric energy. 
A slender stream of water is conducted for 
miles along the mountain side. A mere 
brook it is at best, that would quickly lose 
itself in the sandy plain; you could step 
across it at any point, as it flows swiftly and 



The Good Fight 185 

silently in its open flume. But in its quiet 
course it comes presently to the yawning 
steel pipes that conduct it headlong down, 
hundreds of feet, to the giant turbines 
below; and there it leaps irresistible upon 
those whirling blades, with a roar of energy 
appalling in its intensity — and straightway 
in distant cities a thousand lights shine out 
and a thousand wheels revolve by power of 
that modest stream. 

A life gathered up in one splendid aim 
bears the same relation to the common lives 
of diffuse or intermittent purpose that that 
concentrated column of water bears to other 
mountain streams rippling unharnessed down 
the valley. And it is to such a life of con- 
centrated purpose, gathered together and 
directed to the one point of God's uses, that 
faith in Jesus calls the men and women of 
today. 



CHAPTER XII 

The Discipline of Pain 

"^TpHE weary weight of all this unintel- 
A ligible world " bore very heavily 
upon our Lord. We may say in a sense that 
It broke his heart. And in a world where the 
Master became the Man of Sorrows because 
of the intractable miseries of his brethren, 
it is not possible for the servant to come 
off scot free. In proportion as our eyes are 
open and our sympathies awake, we, too, are 
compelled to recognize that this cannot be 
a holiday world for any one of us. 

Our youthful feeling that the world owes 
us a good time wears off quickly, if we are 
at all thrown into the thoughtful companion- 
ship of Jesus Christ. We may have been 
with rather a merry crowd in our college 
days, but if by the goodness of God we have 
been so thrust out into the tides of common 
life as to see perforce how the other half 
lives, and how sullen and cheerless, nay, how 
bitter and cruel, is the well-nigh hopeless lot 
of innumerable men and women, we have 
been early sobered into thoughtfulness. And 
if we have further realized how our privilege 
and good fortune is a trust on their behalf, 
for which we must give account, life becomes 

186 



The Discipline of Pain 187 

a serious and earnest matter — as It was with 
Jesus. It will be cheered by his courage and 
hopefulness and joy, but it will never escape 
the conviction that ease and comfort are 
not life's chief concern; and that even if we 
are drawn into some fellowship of suffering 
with our Lord and his brethren, no strange 
thing has befallen us. 

All this would be true even if we stood in 
no peril of misfortune on our own account. 
Just because we are part of a race in trouble 
we cannot be surprised if we are involved in 
the sorrow of others in the family. " Bear 
ye one another's burdens " is a law of the 
Christian life. But alas! we have troubles 
of our very own. Indeed, it will be strange 
if our burdens do not involve others and 
at some time bear heavily on those who 
love us, who share their weight by sym- 
pathy. 

We are fixed, here in this world, whether 
we will or no, in a framework of law that we 
cannot in the smallest degree evade, and that 
involves physical decay and death for us 
and for every one we love. These laws go 
on impartially, registering every error and 
folly on our part, and involving these deli- 
cate and quiveringly sensitive machines, our 
bodies, in a network of perilous consequence. 
It is no part of God's plan to shield us from 
the working of these laws of life, or to make 



188 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

for his servants a privileged path of im- 
munity from the common lot. The nerves 
he made to register sensation will thrill to 
pain as quickly in the saint as in the sinner. 
How can men suppose — as many do sup- 
pose — that they are somehow to win through 
this world unscathed, and that any distress 
befalling them implies the failure of God's 
love.^ Or that if he has left them bereaved, 
with aching hearts, he has done them wrong? 
It is all too obvious that God has placed us 
here, not to win a coward's victory by evading 
life's hardness and dodging the stern ways of 
Nature, but to come triumphantly through 
them all, with courage and patience and ever 
growing strength, until the last enemy is 
overcome. 

After we have faced these thoughts for 
many years, and had them forced upon our 
attention from many angles, we are surely 
able by middle age to see more light than 
once we did upon the mystery of pain. A 
mystery it still is, and will be until we see 
all that God sees. But it is not so insoluble 
as once it was, and here and there are un- 
mistakable gleams of heavenly light upon it. 
Our outlook upon life, in spite of all that we 
have seen of sadness, becomes one of settled 
optimism, because we believe in Jesus. 
Here again, all our hopefulness centers about 
him. Our sufficiency is of God, 



The Discipline of Pain 189 

The problem of pain is, of course, far too 
wide to be treated here in its entirety. It 
is bound up with all the tragedy of our 
race — the tragedy of sin and death. The 
never-ending wrongs and sorrows of society 
are but a part of it. We cannot try here to 
construct a theodicy or to justify the ways 
of God to man. We walk by faith, not by 
sight. " Shall not the Judge of all the earth 
do right .^ " Yet the heart of the mystery 
is in the fact that much of earth's sorrow is 
merely brutalizing; it embitters and makes 
defiant. If one is at odds with his Maker it 
is a piteous thing to be desolate and afflicted. 
This is the very center of sin's tragedy. 
If one will have nought to do with him who 
bindeth up the broken-hearted, then this 
world may become a terrifying place. With 
what poignant sorrow our Lord faced this 
fact! We should be recreant to his com- 
passion were we ever to forget it. But it is 
not the problem we have to consider now. 
Faith brings us out into another and a hap- 
pier region — a region where love and pur- 
pose are evidently in the background. 

How are we who believe in Jesus to look 
out upon life's disappointments? What is 
our outlook on life's various discipline, after 
so many years of difficult wayfaring? Is 
it any wiser, any calmer, any more triumph- 
ant than it used to be, for ourselves and 



190 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

those we love? Or is it possible that even 
we who have long counted ourselves his 
disciples are bewildered and faltering be- 
cause at last trouble has fallen upon us? 
Our faith had long since accepted the stern 
facts of life for others, but ourselves we 
regarded, all unconsciously, as sacrosanct; 
and now that pain and loneliness have over- 
taken us, is it possible that the light of our 
trust in God is all but blown out? What 
have we learned through all these years, out 
of the Bible and the open book of life about 
us? " Life and death are the great preach- 
ers." What have they taught us, as we 
have watched so many men and women live 
and die? 

" To spell ' disappointment ' with an h, — 
* his appointment,' " is, after all, the sum- 
ming up of all that we have learned. It is 
taught us by the word and example of Jesus, 
and is reinforced by the experience of a 
great company of his disciples. We can 
make no headway against adverse circum- 
stances save as this is rooted in our convic- 
tion. The good will and the loving purpose 
of God are behind our sorrows, however 
these may have come. We do not need to 
reason it out in its detail, even so far as to 
seek to answer categorically the question, 
*' Does God send sorrow? " It is very 
doubtful whether we can reason it out to 



The Discipline of Pain 191 

our satisfaction, with the aid only of the few 
factors of the problem that we have in hand. 
Our case would be very simple, of course, if 
we could see that our Father had directly 
laid on us the crippling accident under which 
our lives for a time lie prostrate. But the 
chances are that we cannot see. 

It may have come as the direct result of 
our own folly. We may, e.g., have over- 
worked and over-strained our powers, in 
spite of the remonstrances of our friends, 
until our nervous system gives out and 
plunges us into that strange twilight of 
mental and physical distress, where we grope 
blindly for the old world of light and cheer 
that we had supposed to be inalienably our 
own. In a dozen different ways we may have 
involved ourselves in troubles that, with more 
or less of justice, may be regarded as our 
punishment. Or, almost worse, a seem- 
ingly irretrievable misfortune may have 
come upon us through sheer carelessness — 
our own or others. Or the disaster may be 
due to the fault or even the wilful wickedness 
of evil men. The direct causes that have 
brought upon us an aching heart may be 
infinitely various and yet in no single in- 
stance clearly reveal any other agency 
than the blundering, foolish, or cruel act of 
ourselves or others. In such a case are we 
to say that the disappointment is his ap- 



192 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

pointment? Are we to claim and find the 
comfort of believing that our Father's love is 
behind all that has overtaken us? 

He who believes in Jesus will have no 
doubt as to the answer. The tiny sparrows 
are beaten down by sleet and storm, are 
chased by hawks and stoned by cruel boys, 
yet not one of them is forgotten before God, 
or falls gasping to the ground without him. 
And we are of more value than many spar- 
rows. Jesus himself had first to learn this 
lesson before he could teach it to his disciples. 
He drank deep of the cup of disappointment. 
It was at his lips almost to the moment of 
his death. But his confidence that his whole 
life was guided by God's wisdom never 
failed him. It might be Judas or it might be 
a ruffian soldier who dealt the blow, but 
his Father's love was using it for a consistent 
and loving purpose. 

His friends had early to learn the same 
lesson. It was hard for John the Baptist 
to realize that the one who had sent him on a 
royal errand might leave him in a dungeon, 
to be the sport of a wicked king and his 
helpless prey at last. And it would have 
been all but impossible for those two im- 
petuous brothers, whom Jesus called from 
their fishing boats to be his friends and com- 
panions, to understand how one of them would 
be beheaded in five years and the other 



The Discipline of Pain 193 

live out the century, yet both equally bear 
witness to the love and guiding hand of 
God. 

As for bearing stoically our own punish- 
ment, as though that at least were of an 
unrelieved bitterness that we had brought 
upon ourselves, in which God had no share, 
the world would be indeed a sad place were 
that the truth. If God were such a Father 
he would be far other than Jesus thought him, 
and far less good than the fathers whom we 
know. If it were only our perfect deeds that 
gave God a chance to react in love upon our 
lives, we should be in an evil case; for most 
of our living is marred with ignorance or 
weakness or self-will, and if his redeeming 
fellowship were to work with us only in our 
sinless moments, we would have little enough 
chance of growing into the divine stature. 
How pitifully and tenderly the fathers and 
mothers of our homes bear with the patheti- 
cally blundering efforts of their children, 
day after day working with them both in 
discipline and reward, but always in love, 
trying to build them up into true manhood 
and womanhood through all their ignorances 
and follies. 

And so, unless we part company with 
Jesus, we must think of God. Does he 
send sorrow.^ Not one of us but has sent 
sorrow into our children's hearts a hundred 



194 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

times, carrying disappointments heavy for 
childish hearts to bear. But we should have 
been selfish and unworthy parents had we 
spared ourselves the pain of their brief 
trouble. In our maturer lives we do wrong 
if we single out the griefs that have come to 
us partly through our own fault, and say, 
" This is my doing. God has no share in 
it, and I must bear it alone with what grace 
I may." God's law has brought it, and God's 
love is all about it day by day, working with 
it and through it, seeking to make us worth- 
ier children by its agency. It might be 
grim to bear alone, but we have no right to 
bear it alone if we have put our trust in 
him. Even though sin should have brought 
it on us, the very essence of forgiveness of 
sin is that son and Father should go on 
thereafter both together, his grace and 
strength and love lightening every conse- 
quence of pain his child may have to carry. 
The sorrow is his love at work. It may 
make the days hard to bear, but they will be 
days when he is at work with us for an end 
all glorious with joy. 

It is an almost fruitless labor to try and 
search out the genesis of the troubles that 
befall us. How many people a minister is 
called to meet, especially in times of be- 
reavement, who are torturing themselves 
with vain regrets and questionings as to 



The Discipline of Pain 195 

whether, if they had only acted more wisely 
at this juncture or at that, the outcome might 
not have been different; or whether any 
element of their fault had entered into the 
case, to involve God's displeasure and bring 
down this sorrow. There is nothing more 
inexcusably wasteful of life's joy than this 
useless probing into an irrevocable past, to 
see whether any elements of personal re- 
sponsibility were there to rob us of trust and 
comfort in God's love in the present distress. 
The past is gone. Let it go! Only God 
knows its bearing on our present. But the 
present is ours. And its clarion call of duty 
is to rise up and play the man; not in obtuse 
forgetfulness of the past or of our weakness, 
but in humble yet joyous confidence in the 
unfailing love and guidance of our Father, 
who is using this, and every other one of 
life's joys and sorrows, to draw us to himself. 
When we were in the full flush of youth 
and high spirits, all heavy sickness and sor- 
row probably seemed to us both repellent 
and mysterious. But we have lived to 
little purpose if we have not discovered before 
now that it is full of beneficent purpose and 
result, and that light plays all about it. 
As John Bunyan quaintly puts it, " The 
Valley of Humiliation is of itself as fruitful 
a place as any the crow flies over, and I 
have known many laboring men that have 



196 Faith of a Middle-^Vged Man 

got good estates there." God works out his 
fatherly purposes for us as readily through 
disappointment as through joy. 

Nor can we imagine how poor and ineflFec- 
tive life's discipline would be, were all 
the elements of hardness to be withdrawn. 
Well do we know the type of life that we 
should choose for ourselves were the choosing 
in our hands. A life with health and good 
cheer unbroken, a busy, unthwarted career 
of activity and usefulness, a life cheered with 
love and saved from loneliness, — how kind 
we should be to ourselves and how disas- 
trously thoughtful for our happiness! How 
ever should we be brave enough to choose 
the things that would build us up in courage 
and patience and trust and tender sym- 
pathy for others.^ For not one of these high 
qualities of a great soul is to be won, save 
out of mingled struggle and defeat and doubt 
and pain. 

Certainly there is neither distinction nor 
virtue in being called to suffer. There is 
not much danger of spiritual pride in the 
fact that we have to fight for a foothold every 
day. On the other hand, can any one sug- 
gest how God is to perfect servants for his 
highest uses, servants proved steadfast and 
faithful under strain, without experiences 
that strain the spirit under trial .^ As F. 
B. Meyer said, " God wants iron saints; 



The Discipline of Pain 197 

and since there is no way of imparting iron 
to the moral nature other than by letting his 
people suflFer, he lets them suffer." ^' Present 
tests are for future trusts." They may be 
unwelcome to bear, but if they are his ap- 
pointment, we can gird ourselves afresh 
each day with confidence, to take up his way. 

How well we know what it is to long for 
mere ease and bodily contentment! to be 
free of the strain of care, the weariness of 
physical disability! to be like the cattle, 
knee-deep in the meadow, browsing all day, 
sleepy-eyed with content, among the grasses 
by the running water, without care and with- 
out fear! Yet none of us but knows this is 
a dream, and not a worthy dream. No 
bovine contentment with good things can 
ever lead us anywhere we want to go. We 
have neither courage nor wisdom to choose 
the lot we need. But thank God that he 
makes his heroes out of those who but for 
him would be with Mr. Faintheart and Mr. 
Fearing to the end. It is only God who is 
wise and strong enough so to choose for us. 

Even had we in us the stuff of heroes, our 
vision reaches such a little way, we have so 
tiny a conception of what life means, or of 
what use God would make of us, that we 
should be hopelessly at a loss to shape our 
own way with assurance. We can only 
trust ourselves implicitly to the road that 



198 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

opens, and fear lest we grudge the effort to 
go forward. As Maltbie Babcock said, 
*' If God permits anything hard in our lives, 
be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is 
what we shall lose if we flinch or rebel." 
'' The present circumstance which presses 
so hard against you," says some unknown 
writer, '' is the best-shaped tool in the Father's 
hand to chisel you for eternity. Trust him, 
then. Do not push away the instrument 
lest you lose its work." 

Does it seem to any as though we were 
drifting into the region of pious sentiment.^ 
It might perhaps seem so to one who has not 
often traversed this ground in thought or 
experience. But we remember that this is 
a common thoroughfare, trodden by un- 
numbered feet. Every inch of the way has 
been explored and tested by multitudes of 
plain-thinking men and women, seeking in 
stress of soul for some sure footing in the 
dark. And no doubt it is there. Any one 
who believes in Jesus must needs be sure 
that these are not mere devout imaginings, 
but primary facts of the spiritual life. 

It is true that Jesus had amazingly little 
to say about life's pain or trial. Much he 
must have said, in quiet talks with men and 
women bearing heavy burdens, in the home 
and in their private life; but almost nothing 
of these intimate words has been preserved 



The Discipline of Pain 199 

to us. Yet the very foundation of his teach- 
ing about our trust in God is that God knows 
and cares and leads. We are not derelicts, 
driven on the great sea by every chance wind 
and wave and current. A firm hand is at 
the helm if only we will trust ourselves obe- 
diently to the Father's guidance. 

Our Lord's own life was the chief witness to 
this truth. It was full of elements of hard- 
ness and humiliation, from his prentice days 
in the village shop to the last months when 
it was not safe for him to show his face 
among his own people. But our minds 
simply refuse to believe that he was the 
sport of unkind circumstance, or that he 
found reason for doubt or dismay in any of 
these things. As his friend said, a few years 
later when in a sea of troubles, " I suffer 
these things; yet I am not ashamed; for I 
know him whom I have believed." 

And so we strengthen ourselves and take 
courage as we find the contrary winds of 
disappointment setting in to thwart our 
dearest purposes. It may be a strange dis- 
maying way that is opening before us; but 
if he is leading us, would we dare to take 
our chance with any way of our own choos- 
ing.^ Nay! we would not dare! He know- 
eth the way that he takes. But we do not 
know; we can hazard no faintest guess as 
to where we should come out were we to 



200 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

follow the joyous, untroubled course of our 
own preference. 

We must grant that it is all a hopeless 
enigma if this life is all. Here among the 
deserts and mountains of the Southwest, the 
tragedy of broken hopes is always before 
one's eyes in its most pathetic form. Year by 
year there comes the unending procession 
of young people in the first flush of youth, 
out of the university often, or just at the 
threshold of business or the newly founded 
home, called to leave all, and after waiting 
a year or two in loneliness and mingled hope 
and fear, to say good-by to everything life 
holds dear and to dear life itself. God 
knows, it is a sight exceeding pitiful. But 
he does know! And these lost lives, so 
fragrant many of them with patience and 
trust, tempered some of them like fine steel 
for choice uses, are no more lost or wasted 
than the life of the Master was lost, broken 
off at thirty-three. 

And how many millions, in these days 
of the Great War, are having to face this 
problem in anguish of spirit, as they see 
those they love going out suddenly from full- 
est strength and ardor of high hope into the 
unknown future. The glory of a noble and 
willing sacrifice is about the soldier, as it is 
not about these poor lads in the desert, but 
the hopeless mystery is the same, if God's 



The Discipline of Pain 201 

household has no more place for them 
at all. 

Glory and honor and immortality are great 
ends, carrying one far out beyond the horizon 
of our world. Yet these are the ends God 
sets before his children. And he who 
believes in Jesus will not be daunted because 
the turn of the road, taking it out of sight, 
comes earlier with him than with most. 
To live softly many years, feeding our ap- 
petites undisturbed, is not what we want — 
we who are sons and daughters of God. As 
Captain Scott said, in those last words in 
his diary, written when freezing, starving, 
alone on the edge of death in that Antarctic 
night, " After all, how much better it has 
been than lounging in too great comfort at 
home." That was heroic! Yes! but it was 
most human! And the feeblest of us, in 
more humble exigencies, may rise to heights 
like that if our eyes are ever toward the 
Lord. For he will pluck our feet out of 
the net. 

But we are not concerned chiefly with the 
distant end. It is almost easier for us to 
believe in a triumph then, when the light at 
last shines clear, than it is to believe in vic- 
tory along the way, in days of dull heart- 
ache, unrelieved by any glory or illumina- 
tion. It is so easy to talk confidently about 
high themes when in a semi-ecstatic mood. 



202 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

But ecstatic moods are few and far be- 
tween, and brave words have little power in 
those sleepless hours before dawn when 
troubles weigh like lead. The very essence 
of real trouble is that it often benumbs our 
sense of spiritual comfort. The sheer weari- 
ness of nervous fatigue clouds over our 
wonted clearness of vision. 

That is where the triumph of faith comes 
in, that it holds firm when what we long to 
see and feel is beyond our seeing. If we 
could only see it, we should have no need of 
faith. Perhaps this is our only chance to 
keep faith for a little in the dark. If some 
of us could really see what will be true for 
us ten years from now, or twenty, we could 
go singing on our way with little need for 
trust or patience. But because we cannot 
see or imagine, we must even go on doggedly, 
day after day, holding our own by faith. 
And unless Jesus was all deluded, and the 
Christian life is a sham, there must be the 
possibility of a victory all along the way, 
even in dark and cloudy days. Unless we 
can say by faith with the light of each new 
morning, " Thanks be unto God who giveth 
us the victory through our Lord Jesus 
Christ," we are receiving something less than 
what God would give his children when they 
are cast down. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Overcoming Under Difficulties 

TT was all very well for John Bunyan to 
•*- say that very tolerable living was to be 
had in the Valley of Humiliation — as per- 
haps he found it in those long years in Bed- 
ford jail. But the practical question is, 
How is it to be found for ordinary people? 
How can it be made tolerable? How can 
dreary days be made other than unprofitable 
and deadening to the spirit? If the burdens 
are too heavy, or the anxiety too great, or 
the pain too insistent, how can trust in 
Jesus Christ lighten the miserable oppres- 
sion, or wring victory out of conditions that 
seem to imply defeat? 

Assuredly there is an answer to these 
questions, for we have seen it worked out in 
human lives many times before our eyes. 
We can hardly fail to have known those 
who have walked steadily through months 
and years of crushing disappointment, not 
only in quiet self-possession, but in peaceful 
triumph of spirit, because God taught them 
how to live. How fervently and continu- 
ously they pled in secret for help to this end, 
we may not know. We did not see much of 
the struggle, only of its results. And yet, 

203 



204 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

if we have been sympathetic observers, we 
have learned a good deal of the practical 
ways and means of overcoming under stress 
of difficulty. We can speak of them with 
fair confidence, even though we may not 
have been called to put them into practice, 
or may have essayed them for ourselves with 
imperfect success, being new to suffering 
and little skilled in habits of courage. In 
any case, we have never reached middle 
age without some efi'orts to walk manfully 
when we were in danger of cowardice, and 
some desire to learn for ourselves how others 
won through their time of testing. 

We have learned in general that men and 
women win these sometimes heroic victories 
of faith in ways that are almost common- 
place in their simplicity, — by paying at- 
tention to every detail of mental and spiritual 
habit that may enable them to overcome. 
It is no large and spectacular experience of 
grace that has transfigured their outlook 
and transformed their weakness into strength. 
They have had no visions vouchsafed them 
that lifted them up above the common lot; 
as Paul was caught up in spirit to the third 
heaven and saw sights such as braced his 
soul to fresh endurance. They are ordinary 
folk, with such gifts as ordinary people have; 
but they have been forced to pay acute at- 
tention to every means the Christian has 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 205 

for holding firm under distress of hostile 
circumstance. They have grown wiser than 
most of us because they have been compelled 
to learn the sources of their strength or else 
give up the fight. And it is good for us to 
give careful scrutiny to the ways and means 
of difiicult campaigning; for we ourselves 
may soon be called upon to play the man 
in a way we have neither expectation nor 
desire of doing at the present time. 

We have already considered the great 
assurance that underlies every other ground 
of comfort when one is brought face to face 
with trouble — that all things work together 
for good to those who love God. Without 
this anchor of the soul, one might easily 
drift before the storm and go to pieces on 
the rocks, for all his brave anticipations and 
wise philosophy. The abiding conviction 
that God's love is over all comes before all 
else in the armory of our defence. 

But there is another noble persuasion that 
strengthens many to heroic patience. It 
may be seen at its best in the brief life of 
Adele Kamm of Geneva, — that high-spirited 
girl whose gallant fight against crushing 
odds has recently been made known to the 
public.^ She has borne witness that her 
joyous acceptance of years of shattering 
pain was made possible only by the assurance 

1 A Huguenot Saint of the Twentieth Century, by Paul Seippel. 



206 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

that her suffering was in a sense for the good 
of others — that it was actually redemptive 
in its effect on other lives; that, in the lan- 
guage of Paul, she filled up what was lacking 
in the sufferings of Christ. She was only a 
girl, untrained in exact or philosophic expres- 
sion, and she has put her thought perhaps 
more strongly than is fully warranted. But 
it is far from being a new thought, and in 
her case the multitude of lives she cheered 
and helped to overcome, even in thick dark- 
ness, bears witness to its essential truth. 
Her triumphant victory over such affliction as 
most men would count more terrible than 
death lifted from many shoulders a burden 
of doubt and fear that made men unable to 
look up to God. Her quiet, glad suffering 
brought them deliverance. She could not 
work or preach; but she could suffer so 
gallantly, so joyously, that she worked effec- 
tively with her Lord to set at liberty those 
that were bruised. 

Her experience, though of unusual and 
heroic form, is the experience in a humble 
way of many undistinguished souls, who are 
helped to bear their burden for the sake of 
others. It is easier for them to hold still 
under trial and meet the days uncomplaining 
because their courage and patience are so 
obvious an encouragement to others along 
the way. They may not be of much use 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 207 

otherwise, but their very faithfulness under 
strain serves a real even if modest purpose 
in the lives of some about them. Were 
they to whimper, others would be afraid. 
If they can be of good cheer, others will bear 
themselves more faithfully in the thick of 
the fight. Phillips Brooks put this with his 
wonted clearness when he said, ^' I am sure 
that you or I could indeed be strengthened 
to meet some great experience of pain if we 
really believed that by our suffering we were 
to be made luminous with help to other men. 
They are to get from us painlessly what we 
have got most painfully from God. There 
is the power of the bravest martyrdom and 
the hardest work that the world has ever 
seen." And the same thought is expressed 
from another angle by Alexis Stein, " I am 
only sure of this: the fight that each man 
fights behind his chamber door for courage 
and for patience and for faith, he fights not 
for himself alone, he fights for all mankind; 
he fights as one who is a helper of his kind, 
as a blood brother of that One who upon 
the cross become the burden-bearer of the 
human race." 

To be sure, this is a sublime motive and 
one for great souls. But it is characteristic 
of Christianity to bring the sublimest motives 
to the humblest tasks and humblest people. 
And there is no one of us who may not proudly 



208 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

and resolutely endeavor to hold back the 
tide of personal grief or cowardice for the 
sake of those at his side. To win our private 
battle is to be a good comrade to others in 
the fight. And this is one of the ways and 
means of victory, that we should deny our- 
selves the indulgence of giving way under 
ill-fortune, in order that we may stand 
humbly with our Lord as helpers of men. 
It is a small contribution to make, as com- 
pared with the large services of those active 
in the fight; but even the w^idow's mite 
was a fragrant offering, and just to be pa- 
tient under disappointment may also be an 
honorable sacrifice. 

The longer he lives, the more is any 
thoughtful observer compelled to notice 
how largely the eff'ect of trouble upon 
one is determined in extent by one's 
mental attitude toward it. It is not the 
trouble or the burden that lays low the 
spirit, but one's personal reaction upon it. 
The spirit in which we receive it, and the 
point of view from which we regard it, make 
all the diff'erence between its being sup- 
portable or the reverse. 

There is a deep philosophy in that charm- 
ing incident of Dr. Guthrie's meeting with 
the little girl who was tottering under the 
weight of a big child whom she was carrying. 
''Is he not too great a burden for you.^" 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 209 

Dr. Guthrie asked. " Oh, no! " she said, 
" He's no a burden, he's ma wee brither." 
It would have been a staggering weariness 
to some, but the touch of love made it some- 
thing not only to be expected but bringing 
reward. As a wise specialist in nervous 
diseases has said, " If there is something 
you have got to do, don't allow yourself to 
regard it as a burden." Carry it as lightly 
as may be, knowing that love comes with it, 
and that the necessary strength for meeting 
it will of a certainty be supplied. If the 
sorrow that suddenly overtakes one is to 
be received with resentful astonishment, 
the pain of it will be bitter indeed. But if 
one is a disciple of Jesus, and meets the blow 
as trustfully as Jesus met the reverses that 
came to him, the corrosive bitterness is 
somehow dissolved away, and one's spirit 
rises calmly to the demand upon its con- 
stancy. 

Very likely we may be unable to change 
the outward circumstances of our life, but 
our inward reaction upon those circumstances 
is susceptible of the widest alteration. And 
so life's clearest teaching, for those who have 
to bear hardness, is that in every way within 
their power they should surround their 
stubborn lot with such thoughts and asso- 
ciations as yield strength and hope. The 
New Testament has not much to say of the 



210 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

details of this mental warfare against en- 
feebling and depressing ideas, that so griev- 
ously add to the weight of any of life's 
burdens, but it puts before us the general 
outlook of faith and good cheer as the birth-^ 
right of every believer in Jesus, and men are 
to use their aggregate experience and wisdom 
in applying this broad heritage of faith to 
the individual problems of need. The psy- 
chology of faith, in its application to the 
troubles men have to meet, is full of helpful- 
ness. One who must cope with pain must be 
wise in the art of meeting it, as Jesus did, 
w^ith every aid that grace and nature may 
make possible. 

Above all else is the demand for a relentless 
warfare upon fear. Few people in their early 
years have any conception of its dread in- 
fluence in spoiling human life. But as our 
acquaintance with life grows, and we see 
how bitter and evil is the bondage to anxiety 
into which many fall, and how cruelly fear 
accentuates every sorrow that men en- 
counter, we are almost inclined to regard it 
as a chief enemy of human happiness. In 
all seriousness it is more cruel than death, 
for it anticipates death a hundred times, and 
cowers before every distress that might 
possibly precede the end. 

There is a direct reason for resisting fear 
on physiological and hygienic grounds. Our 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 211 

very bodies are made to respond to faith and 
hope with the maximum of healthful func- 
tioning, and to suffer serious inhibitions 
under the depressing influence of their 
opposite. As Dr. Sadler has said, " By 
nature the human mind and body are so 
constructed that the mental attitude of faith 
and optimism is absolutely essential to the 
normal and ideal working of every mental 
power and physical function." It is reas- 
suring to think that even our bodies show 
that they are made for the optimism of 
joy. They are fitted to respond normally 
to hope and confidence. Indeed, could it 
be otherwise with the children whom God 
made in his own image .^ And yet we, out of 
sheer weakness and contrariness of will, fall 
under strong temptation to load ourselves 
uselessly with anxiety, and to double our 
cares by anticipating and exaggerating every 
misfortune that might conceivably befall us. 
Men do not even wait for misfortune to 
arrive in order to be miserable, but are 
miserable in advance, in fear of troubles 
that never appear; and slight illnesses or 
reverses are made tormenting not by present 
pain but by the empty imagination of worse 
pains to come. 

In the heyday of robust health and ir- 
repressible good spirits, we can afford to 
laugh at so preposterous a method of poi- 



212 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

soning life. But as cares multiply, and the 
steady pressure of years begin to tell on 
heart and nerves and all the vital organs, 
so that one can no longer count on involun- 
tary and automatic response to cheerful 
suggestion, the involuntary optimism of 
youth must be replaced by a deliberate and 
determined principle of hopeful living. One 
can easily drift into dejection and depression, 
in the years when disappointments begin to 
thicken; but there is no such thing as drift- 
ing into a calm and overcoming hopefulness. 
The triumph of faith in the face of pain is 
only won by a rigid refusal to live in the 
future or to grapple with more than the 
present demand for strength and self-posses- 
sion. Is the present endurable? '' Oh, yes,'' 
men say, " the present is endurable enough, 
but tomorrow — !" And then, because of 
tomorrow's menace, they go on to burden 
their souls today with all sorts of ills that are 
likely never to come, or which, if they do 
come, somehow bring with them the needful 
strength for the emergency. 

How well do we of middle age understand 
this ever-recurring tragedy. We have every 
reason to resist it with all our power; but 
chiefly because it is treason to our Father's 
love. 

" Lie still, be strong, today. 
But Lord, tomorrow, 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 213 

What of tomorrow, Lord? 

Shall there be rest from toil, be truce from sorrow, 

" Be living green upon the sward. 
Now but a barren grave to me. 
Be joy for sorrow? 
Did I not die for thee? 
Do I not live for thee? 
Leave Me tomorrow." — Christina Rossetti, 

If we are honestly to believe in Jesus, if 
we are to keep his commandments, we shall 
leave tomorrow to him. This does not de- 
mand sainthood, or resolution born out of 
high spiritual attainment, but only for hon- 
esty of discipleship. No one could genu- 
inely claim to be a follower of Jesus and yet 
ignore his commands against impurity or 
malice. Yet his command against anxiety 
is as clear-cut and emphatic as his condemna- 
tion of hypocrisy. " Be not anxious for the 
morrow! " was the conclusion of an urgent 
warning against the laying waste of life by 
fear. Our Lord was in earnest in the matter, 
and spoke with great plainness, as of an 
unmitigated curse in human experience. 
He was not pointing out a sort of higher life 
for the inner circle of devout spirits, but was 
enjoining on all his disciples obedience to 
one of the rudimentary principles of vic- 
torious living. 

The disciple of Jesus faces therefore a 
clear-cut issue in this matter of entertaining 



214 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

fear. Shall he obey or disobey? Many are 
disposed to evade the issue by pleading a 
natural weakness of temperament, or an 
inability to give up worrying. But this we 
may not do, any more than we may plead a 
natural disposition to cheat our neighbor, 
as an excuse for dishonesty. Yet in very 
truth we are hard pressed to know how to 
obey. No doubt it is more difficult for 
some than for others. Some are naturally 
brave, some are naturally timid; some have 
no imagination, others have to fight an 
imagination both vivid and restless. For 
those of us who find it hardest to leave the 
future alone, what hope is there of being 
able to obey.^ 

Above all else is the resource of prayer! 
" Ask and ye shall receive." We know that 
in such a case as this — the keeping of one of 
our Lord's commandments — there can be 
no doubt of our Father's good will to hear 
and answer. So we shall ask of him be- 
lieving, and shall obey by the power that 
he will grant. Our whole religion stands or 
falls by this test. And it will not fall! 
By faith we may venture out upon his promise 
to keep us without fear. Not that the habit 
of quiet trust will become all-prevailing with 
us at once. We shall need a sleepless watch- 
fulness, and new emergencies will probably 
need to be fought out anew. But as our 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 215 

day so shall our strength be. Grace will 
come as needed. " When I said, my foot 
slippeth; thy lovingkindness, O Lord, held 
me up." (Ps.94 : 18.) 

And as God has forbidden us this vice of 
fear, he will assuredly make it possible for 
us to overcome if we lean on him. Not for a 
year at a time — not today even for tomor- 
row's needs. But moment by moment, as 
the demand is. As the proverb of the Cau- 
casian mountaineers puts it, " Heroism is 
endurance for one moment more." It is the 
one moment more that, in reliance upon a 
power that cannot fail, we humbly trust to 
bring us through to the end. 

No doubt the heavenly grace comes to us 
in homely ways, for such is its nature. And 
it is by simply formed habits that we go on 
from the negative denial of fear to the 
positive assertion of hope and courage. If 
we are to meet pain in the spirit that renders 
it least painful, it will be by giving large 
place in our thought to the coyntervailing 
assurances of our Father's love and help, and 
of ultimate deliverance. We owe a large 
debt to certain modern schools of thought 
much spoken against, for their earnest in- 
sistence upon the present and actually opera- 
tive power of divine love in human life, even 
when circumstances seem outwardly most 
hostile. The Christian church has always 



216 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

theoretically believed in it, but the Christian 
life has too largely been left without any 
adequate conception of its reality and com- 
fort. A future time and place of consola- 
tion has been strongly affirmed; but the 
present uplifting consequence to human life 
of the fact that we live and move and have our 
being in One who is almighty love and good- 
ness, has been miserably lost sight of or 
misunderstood. 

For generations the reformed churches 
seemed to think they honored God by deepen- 
ing the gloom of the present vale of tears 
in contrast with the joy of heaven; and 
language was pressed hard to describe the 
darkness of our earthly pilgrimage. Resigna- 
tion was the virtue becoming to our present 
lot, and the deeper the gloom the more 
meritorious the resignation. That there is 
sadness enough in the world, every one will 
admit. But to accept and affirm it as the 
element and atmosphere of the Christian 
life is the essential denial of the teaching of 
Jesus Christ, who left his joy to men and 
bade them triumph in him. If we believe in 
Jesus, we can scarcely affirm or assert too 
stubbornly the presence and power of pur- 
poseful love as the deepest and most present 
force of all the forces that affect our life 
this very day. It is a reservoir of strength 
and comfort for those who are in need. We 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 217 

may draw upon it for our necessities. Our 
sufficiency, we say again, is from God. 
And it is not a miserable or starveling suffi- 
ciency, but grateful and generous to the soul. 

To be sure, this is bold doctrine. It 
demands a visible and present evidence of 
God's power in human life. We are venturing, 
some would think, on pretty thin ice. If 
it holds, well and good; but if it does not 
hold, we risk for a minor good the imperilment 
of all the great doctrines of grace. That is 
true. If it does not hold good, everything 
goes. If this present help of God in brighten- 
ing life, on which Jesus laid such stress, 
fails to commend itself as a reality, any- 
thing else that Jesus said must fail to con- 
vince — it is of little consequence. But to 
him who ventures by faith to trust himself to 
Jesus' assurance, there will be no failure or 
unreality. As some tempted soul once cried 
out, '^ O my God, in thee have I trusted, let 
me not be put to shame. . . . Yea, none 
that wait for thee shall be put to shame." 
(Ps. 25 : 2, 3.) The only danger is that we 
shall be afraid to venture — that we shall 
neither trust in the Lord not wait for him. 

But this is the way to victory — in season 
and out of season to deepen our reliance 
on the promises of God, for the most practi- 
cal purposes of daily living. It was in this 
intensely practical way that Paul lived. 



218 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

His prayers for the young converts were 
undoubtedly the reflection of his petitions for 
himself. And there is no petition that is 
more amazing in its boldness, yet more 
practical in its purpose, than his request, 
e.g., that those tempted Colossians might be 
'' strengthened with all power, according to 
the might of his glory, unto all patience and 
longsuflfering with joy." By day and night, 
in weakness and perplexity, that marvellous 
expectation of power for self-possessed en- 
durance will be found on trial to justify itself 
in human experience. 

No doubt there is an unintelligent and un- 
reasonable way of using what are called the 
" Bible promises." Texts wrenched from 
their forgotten context are made to do duty 
in ways that are all too plainly inadmissible. 
Yet, on the other hand, our lack of intelli- 
gence is far more likely to be shown by our 
failure to utilize the great assurances of help 
and comfort that are legitimately for us. 
It does not greatly matter to whom the as- 
surance originally came; it may be as much 
for us as though it were freshly spoken in our 
ears. The principles of divine action do not 
change, nor the methods of God's compas- 
sion; and if we are in the spiritual position 
of that one who long ago received the divine 
encouragement, the assurance is as much for 
us as though not a day had intervened. 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 219 

The promises of God to tempted souls are 
of an unchanging validity; and the great 
assertions of faith in this unchanging God 
are as apt upon our lips as upon those of 
any saint or prophet of the past. 

If one has to keep watch in the night 
through hours of restlessness or pain, it is 
a most gracious comfort to let one's mind 
range through the centuries of Hebrew 
history and single out the assurances of 
faith that came to earnest seekers after God, 
like rain upon the mown grass. It is of an 
inexpressible encouragement to remember 
how for thousands of years strong men have 
been passing through just such hours of 
anxious weakness, and, having reached out in 
the dark for a divine reinforcement, have 
found answer to their hopes. Our case is 
not peculiar. We are not the first ones to 
be timidly fighting against odds that we 
find too hard for us. There is no experience 
more human than to cry out of the depths to 
God, and it has been equally human to find 
the relief of a Father's response. And these 
experiences have left their witness in mani- 
fold words of confidence or promise all 
through that marvellous Old Testament, 
and in a lesser degree, and at rare intervals, 
in other sacred books of the East. 

The book of the Psalms is a mosaic of 
human documents, telling of the distresses 



220 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

and the deliverances of men who put their 
trust in God; and in it there are hundreds of 
verses that fit into our fears and hopes as the 
sunlight fits into the hollows of the hills. 
The prophets, too, lived in days of uncer- 
tainty and fear, and were driven to take 
refuge in the Almighty. Their prophetic 
insight into his response is found in such 
utterances of reassurance as have been ever 
since a pillow for weary heads to rest upon. 
As in the typical words, " When thou passest 
through the waters I will be with thee, and 
through the rivers, they shall not overflow 
thee." (Is. 43 : 2.) Some will object that 
these promises are very old, and were made 
for a specific time and purpose long since 
forgotten of men. It is enough to answer 
that he who believes in Jesus will find in 
them assurances as new as last night's 
emergency, and specifically addressed to the 
very son or daughter of the Most High who 
calls on Him for help. There is a permanent 
validity about these pledges of the loving- 
kindness of God to those who cast them- 
selves on him, on which we may venture a 
complete reliance without fear. 

It is the best that Is true, for those who 
leave themselves trustfully in God's hands. 
In our early years we are apt to be too so- 
phisticated and too cautious to accept God's 
greater mercies without argument. It is a 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 221 

sign of maturing and not of weakening judg- 
ment if we have grown more childlike and 
simple in our reliance upon his fatherly good- 
ness in our times of need. It was the massive 
intellect of Jonathan Edwards that lay be- 
hind his saying that he " very often thought 
of taking hold of Christ as a little child, to be 
led by him through the wilderness of this 
world." And Clay Trumbull has given the 
ripe experience of a strong man in the story 
of his own nightly prayer: 

" I remember, many years ago, a little boy on a 
trundle bed, having just retired for the night. Be- 
fore going to sleep, he turned in the direction of the 
large bed on which his father lay, and said, 
* Father, are you there?' and the answer came 
back, * Yes, my son.' I remember that that 
boy turned over and went to sleep without a 
thought of harm. Tonight that little boy is an 
old man of seventy, and every night before going 
to sleep he looks up into the face of his heavenly 
Father, and says, * Father, are You there .^ ' and 
the answer comes back, * Yes, my son.' And 
then he asks in childish faith, * Will You take care 
of me tonight? ' and the answer comes back, clear 
and strong, ' Yes, my son.' Whom need we 
fear, if God our Father be with us? " 

He who believes in Jesus may, as a little 
child, rest upon the mighty presence of his 
Father and lie down in peace. 

After all, perhaps the really keen distresses 
of life are not the ones hardest to bear, sim- 
ply because the very stress of our need drives 
us at such times to lean on God and to call 



222 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

up to our help the great reserves. We may 
say with Mark Rutherford, " The help that 
is most wanted is not remedies against 
great sorrows. The chief obstacle to the 
enjoyment of life is its dullness and the weari- 
ness which invades us when there is nothing 
to be seen or done of any particular value." 
This is the typical temptation of middle 
age. The glowing hopes and ambitions that 
have so long buoyed us up and carried us on 
have either been satisfied or have grown pale 
and ineffectual with years of non-realization. 
And as the early enthusiasm dies out, there 
is danger that we allow the late afternoon 
to set in dull and gray, as though the day 
could now hold nothing new and nothing 
great; nothing to thrill the spirit; little indeed 
but the gradual depletion of our powers. 
Especially is this true of those lonely souls, 
bereaved by the Great War, who say heavily 
to themselves that life never again can be 
what it has been. 

Life has few disappointments more be- 
numbing than such despondency; and this, 
at least, is not of our Father's sending. 
Surely it is one of the most insidious and 
paralyzing temptations that life holds, and 
many men and women are called upon to 
fight against it as against an arch-enemy of 
their souls. To come to a new year apathetic 
and indifferent, as though the interest of 



Overcoming Under Difficulties 223 

life were over, without any song in the heart 
because of hopes yet to blossom, is to be 
numbered among the defeated. But against 
this we must set ourselves with stern resolve. 
Yet not only with stern resolve, as though we 
were compelling ourselves grimly to be cheer- 
ful when there is no cheer, but with fresh- 
springing anticipation of new mornings of 
gladness yet to dawn. 

The imperishable element of wonder and 
surprise in the Christian life is what we must 
guard as we guard that life itself. We have 
tasted that the Lord is gracious — who would 
say that we have more than tasted? That 
the best is yet to be, is the confident affirma- 
tion of the disciple of Jesus, so long as the 
resources of God are not exhausted. It 
would be a tragedy indeed if the first stumb- 
ling years of discipleship, so limited in 
understanding and in capacity to receive, 
were to be the best years, reaching heights 
never afterward attained; as though we 
had once experienced at the full the love of 
God, and nothing higher thereafter remained 
to be enjoyed. 

What a miserable travesty this is of the 
actual reality! Does any one suppose that 
the gray world of closed possibilities, on which 
we sometimes look out with dull, unlit eyes, 
is the real world — the true world of the 
glorious God of life and joy? If our gaze is 



224 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

heavy and lustreless, it neither sees nor 
tells the truth. Rather was the truth hinted 
at in those rare moments of ecstasy in years 
gone by, before shades of the prison-house 
began to close around us, when at some height 
of clairvoyant emotion we looked out upon 
a world transfigured with a joy we could 
neither measure nor understand. It is not 
reality that is grasped by wearied senses, 
jaded and dulled with years of care and 
labor. The real outlook is full of the glory of 
the majesty of him who made us to love 
beauty and to thirst for life. 

And what waits for us when we are past 
middle age is all the ocean fullness of God's 
yet unexplored goodness. We are at its 
margin still — we have put out but a little 
way from shore. The wonder of his plans of 
grace, the surprise of fresh awakenings to 
his love and power, are waiting for us yet, 
if we are waiting for the Lord. We have 
not quaffed already the cup of life so that 
only the dregs remain. If the Lord is the 
portion of our cup we have yet to drink of 
life at the full. We are not among the long 
shadows of the afternoon. We have but to 
wait a little, and for us, lo, 

"Morning comes singing o'er the sea!" 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Hope of Everlasting Life 

WE who have reached middle age can 
no longer conceal from ourselves that 
we have reached and passed the high tide of 
life's joys. The ebb has begun, and there 
will be no turning now until the end. Al- 
ready we have begun to lose the things 
that gave life its early color and delight. 
We are no longer so anxious for fresh joys 
as we are to keep those we have. But we 
cannot keep them. Life has so long meant 
to us a steady crescendo of powers and pos- 
sessions that we are a little startled to reflect 
that in the very nature of the case it is 
likely to mean for many of us an equally 
steady diminuendo from now on. The future 
begins to look at times a little gray. This 
would not so much matter if our desires 
were fading in equal proportion; but the 
hunger for life is as strong in us as it ever 
was, or stronger. Is there anything to 
satisfy it, or must we steel ourselves to a 
gradual surrender of all we have and are? 

What is the farthest reach of human 
life? Are we in sight of it already? What 
are its utmost powers of development? 
Have we seen all of growth that we shall 

225 



226 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

ever see? The answer means either tragedy 
or inspiration for our daily life. Science can- 
not tell us. It can follow our body's career 
up to the last instant, but it has no instru- 
ments or powers of calculation so delicate as 
to follow our spirit one step beyond. Phi- 
losophy can only speculate, without assur- 
ance. And when the earth is actually 
slipping from beneath one's feet, specula- 
tion affords poor standing-ground. 

Only in Jesus Christ is there chance of 
an answer. Only by his spirit can we mea- 
sure our spirit's capacity for life. The his- 
tory of the human soul is written in him. 
And, as we know^, he who believes in Jesus 
will rest in the quiet assurance of a life be- 
yond the grave — not so much because of 
what Jesus taught, nor even because of the 
historical weight of evidence for his resur- 
rection, but because of the whole weight and 
significance. of his personality. We shall be 
interested in every concurrent and corrobora- 
tive judgment from thoughtful men, from 
Socrates and Plato down to our own day. 
Always wistfully eager for more light, we 
shall give attention to what every latest 
philosopher has to say upon the subject, 
however depressing his lack of spiritual in- 
sight may be. But we shall neither rest on 
their support, nor be discouraged by their 
indecision. 



Hope of Everlasting Life 227 

As our solicitude about a future life 
grows keener, as the hope of it becomes 
gradually the central hope of all that is 
left us, we become even more critical of the 
ground of our faith. As Bossuet said, 
" The greatest aberration of the mind con- 
sists in believing a thing because it is de- 
sirable." We want no such aberration, even 
though it should be full of comfort. We want 
reasonable assurance. We cannot be satisfied 
with analogies or probabilities. We do not 
ask for proof of what may not be proved, 
but we do ask for that intimate and satisfying 
ground of conviction that shall be un- 
shakable. And this we find in Jesus Christ. 
If we believe in him, we cannot doubt that 
the day of the soul is not concluded here under 
the sun. 

This is not because of the abundance of 
his teaching upon the subject. It is always 
a fresh surprise to run over the three Synop- 
tists and see how Jesus was content to leave 
the subject of the future life almost com- 
pletely in the shadow. If his teachings in the 
matter had been in any wise proportionate 
to the curiosity of his church, or if he had 
deemed its importance for human life to be 
anything like what his followers have sup- 
posed, the New Testament record would cer- 
tainly have been very different from what 
it is. But apart from apocalyptic allusions 



228 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

to the Judgment Day, a single parable that 
makes use of the conventional Jewish imagery 
of Abraham's bosom, and the brief argument 
with the Sadducees regarding the resurrec- 
tion, we are left almost without suggestion 
as to the nature of the spirit's existence after 
death. 

This is not at all as we would have it. 
It is not even what we should expect to 
be the case. But it is the unmistakable 
and unyielding fact. The discourses of 
Jesus had to do with the homely and prosaic 
duties of men toward men, here and now on 
earth, with the great good fight of the King- 
dom of God here amidst the alien conditions 
that we know so well, and with the life of 
faith and love toward God that is the fulfilling 
of the law. His whole soul went out toward 
the men and women who were fighting the 
same battle he was fighting, and his whole 
teaching seems to have been absorbed with 
the ways and means of bringing this fight to 
a successful issue. And he did not count 
among these ways and means a foreknowl- 
edge of the conditions of spirit life in another 
world. 

Probably they transcended human lan- 
guage, as well as human understanding. 
But it would seem they were not much in 
his mind. " Out of the abundance of the 
heart the mouth speaketh," and the reason 



Hope of Everlasting Life 229 

that he did not speak of them was because 
he was more concerned with other things. 
As Jesus only spoke those words that were 
given him to speak, it more and more seems 
probable to this generation that the detailed 
knowledge of a world to come — as of the 
time of the last day — was not among the 
things revealed to him. '' What is that 
to thee? Follow thou me/' would have 
been his reply to those whose curiosity 
pressed him for an answer. He centered 
men's thoughts upon the infinite impor- 
tance of the present hour — its duties, its 
rewards, its heavenly and eternal signifi- 
cance. He left the great hope shining clear, 
to light up every footstep of the way. None 
should ever pluck them out of their Father's 
hand. But of material for speculation or 
day-dreaming as to another existence he 
left them next to nothing. 

In this we cannot but think that our 
own generation is nearer to his will than 
some of those that have gone before. Of 
course many in our day, as in all days, 
are like the rich fool of whom Jesus spoke, 
who was so engrossed with making a fortune 
that he utterly forgot to make a life. He was 
of the earth earthy. He needed to have the 
searchlight of his eternal destiny turned upon 
his daily living. Not one of us but needs the 
stimulus of an eternal hope, in all our think- 



230 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

ing and doing. But the average Christian 
of today is singularly unlike the so-called 
'' heavenly-minded man " of a few genera- 
tions past. That saintly spirit, William Law, 
was typical of the best Christian thought of 
the time, when he gave explicit direction, in 
his Serious Call^ for a fixed daily time of 
meditation upon death and its issues. To 
'' set one's affections upon things above " 
meant for him and his contemporaries that 
they should definitely detach their gaze from 
earthly or social considerations, and fasten 
it upon their personal lot in a yet unrevealed 
world to come. In proportion as they were 
able to do this they were heavenly-minded 
and ripening for eternity. 

Such a thought has somehow faded out of 
the religious experience of today, even with 
those whom age or infirmity might be sup- 
posed largely to have shut up to thoughts 
like these. It has been the good fortune 
of the writer to talk with many saintly men 
and women who were very near the other 
side, whose remaining interests in this world 
would seem almost too slight to hold their 
thoughts to earth. But with rare exceptions 
their thoughts were frankly engaged, not 
with heaven or its possibly near dawn upon 
their spirits, but with the same Kingdom of 
God on earth with whose welfare much of 
their life had been bound up. The last 



Hope of Everlasting Life 231 

word of more than one soul in distress of 
deep waters has been, 

I love thy kingdom, Lord, 

The house of thine abode; 
The church our dear Redeemer bought 

With his own precious blood. 

And, after all, is not this as our Lord 
would have it? This is a fighting world 
and we are called to a fighting career. The 
rest of heaven does not gradually replace 
the strain of the fight. Only as we lay down 
the worn body do we lay off the old armor of 
the finished campaign. And we need not 
distress ourselves if we are not as " other- 
worldly " as we once supposed we would be 
when life was two-thirds done. Our Lord 
was very busy about his Father's business 
almost up to his last day of living. His 
preparedness did not come from weeks of 
meditation about the hereafter, but from a 
single devotion to each day's call during 
that last crowded springtime. In this, as in 
all else, he was perfectly natural. If we, as 
his followers, live a life chiefly guided by 
his teachings, without straining or artifi- 
ciality, it is likely to be shaped more and 
more by the ambition, " Thy will be done 
on earth as it is done in heaven"; and its 
other-worldliness will appear in its active 
love rather than in its holy imagination of 
unrevealed glories. 



232 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

All this, however, is far from meaning 
either that interest in a possible immor- 
tality is dying out, or that a firm assur- 
ance of it is of little consequence to human 
life. The opposite is true. Never was the 
problem so vital a one as it is today, simply 
because life itself is more intense, more 
vital, more full of value, than it has ever been 
before; and as our valuation of life rises, 
so does our reluctance to see it end, half- 
satisfied, in death. To a stolid Chinese peas- 
ant, knowing few joys above the level of 
animal comfort, whose life has been grudging 
and difficult from birth to death, it may be of 
little consequence whether a wider future 
awaits him. But just in proportion as 
life-becomes rich and wonderful and crowded 
with possibilities of high attainment barely 
opening upon us in this brief hand's breadth 
of years, do we shrink from laying it down — 
like a thirsty man who has just raised the 
cup of water to his lips. No doubt there 
are some discouraged souls who would gladly 
put out the lamp of life and sink into an 
eternal sleep. But there are not many so 
crushed of spirit, even among the miserable; 
and in this good world of God there should be 
none at all. Assuredly there are none among 
those who have caught the vision that Jesus 
had, of the Kingdom of God and its eternal 
fellowship of love between God and men. 



Hope of Everlasting Life 233 

To have seen life as Jesus saw it, majestic 
with issues of transcendent value, is to cling 
to it with a hope that refuses to be denied. 
And never has life been so majestically full of 
worth and promise as it is today. 

Our generation hungers for immortality 
not only because life is more wonderful than 
it has been, but because, as human life be- 
comes increasingly intense and complicated, 
we need the reaction of a faith in immortality 
upon every day of living. In dull and slug- 
gish times, when every man at evening sat 
in quiet at his own tent door, it may well 
have been easier than now to trust placidly 
in the righteousness of Jehovah, as the God of 
all the earth. But in the feverish intel- 
lectual restlessness and social discontent of 
our day, always harassed by the insoluble 
problems of wrong and pain and inequality, 
always beset with the temptation to cynicism 
or frivolity or despair, we need, as almost 
never before, the steadying assurance of an 
infinite value and reach to human life, in 
which the resources of eternal love and right- 
ousness shall have a chance to work out to 
completion what this brief chaotic strife 
of right with wrong can never bring to pass. 
Eternity was the scale on which Jesus 
worked out his earthly plan; and nothing 
but a like confidence in eternity gives one 
room to think after him his thoughts. 



234 Faith of a Middle- Aged Man 

But whether or not we need the stimulus 
and comfort of such a hope, it is obvious that 
he who believes in Jesus w411 find this sublime 
anticipation blossoming in his heart. It is 
impossible to trust in him and in the worth of 
his spiritual insight, and yet suppose for a 
moment that he lived in a world of spiritual 
unrealities, and gave his life at last for an 
illusion. He was as sure that the grave was 
not the end of life for men, as he was that he 
himself was returning to the Father. He was 
never haunted by the fear that either Phari- 
see or Roman could put an end to his fellow- 
ship with the Father, by the simple expedient 
of crushing the life out of his body. The 
infinite values of the whole moral universe 
of his filial communion with God were not 
at the mercy of a bare bodkin. And with an 
equal clearness of vision he saw that his 
brethren also belonged to a household that is 
not of this earth only. So that for us who 
believe in Jesus, his convictions are mani- 
festly decisive. 



CHAPTER XV 
The Unending Fellowship 

WE cannot rest content, however, with 
the mere assertion of the decisiveness 
of Jesus' faith in immortality. What is it 
specifically in his personality and teaching 
that gives ground for this assurance, in the 
face of so many fears and questionings by 
wise men in our day? 

It is well to give a moment's consideration 
to these fears, in passing. We must not 
allow ourselves to be too seriously con- 
cerned by them, as though they somehow 
furnished a body of contrary evidence. We 
who have tried to keep an open mind through 
thirty years of dogmatic intolerance, both 
theological and scientific, do well to remem- 
ber that we may approach this question 
knowing that it is a clear field for spiritual 
evidence, in which science has no discourag- 
ing word to offer. We need have no appre- 
hension of " doing violence to reason," 
as though the biological researches of our 
time had somehow cast reasonable doubt 
upon humanity's last and greatest hope. 

There seems to be in many minds a sus- 
picion that a firm trust in immortality has 
in some way become out of date, as though 

235 



236 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

Haeckel and a few other dogmatists of like 
temper had proved it to be unworthy of a 
scientific mind. Professor Palmer of Har- 
vard has well said, " Formerly most of the 
superstitions of the day sprang from religion. 
In our time they are more apt to come from 
cheap science, and often succeed in terroriz- 
ing the religious mind." It is only cheap 
or presumptuous science that could go so 
far beyond its data of fact as to affirm that 
the universe has no place for spiritual exis- 
tences apart from a physical organism, and 
that the life of the soul must needs end with 
the life of the body. We can afford to dis- 
miss such skeptical intolerance with the 
stern rebuke of so thoroughgoing an evolu- 
tionist as Professor Fiske, that it ^' affords 
perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless 
assumption that is known to the history of 
philosophy." 

The most decisive and satisfying utter- 
ances of Jesus center about the personal 
relationship to himself of the disciples. 
The intimacy of fellowship and love that had 
begun between them was unlike all other 
human friendships, so far as we know them. 
It was not for a possible two years, within 
the familiar confines of Galilee and Judea, 
but was untrammeled by time or place. It 
would outwear the decay of the body, and 
would go on undisturbed under new and 



The Unending Fellowship 237 

strange conditions of which they could form 
no conception. Their fortunes were bound 
up with him for more than a few years of 
painful contest against overwhelming odds. 
They were to see and share his glory as well 
as his humiliation. 

They had little idea of what this meant; 
for their thoughts scarcely lifted above a 
purely Jewish setting. But we can see how 
Jesus was facing for them a shoreless future. 
And this future was to be theirs because they 
were his friends. " Because I live ye shall 
live also." They were to " inherit eternal 
life " because they had chosen to suffer 
hardness with him here; as, indeed, all those 
who should lose their life for his sake should 
find it. " Where I am," he said, " there 
shall also my servant be." And in that 
verse which has sunk so deep into the hearts 
of millions facing the deep waters, either for 
themselves or those they loved, he said, 
" I go to prepare a place for you. And if I 
go and prepare a place for you, I will come 
again and receive you unto myself, that 
where I am there ye may be also." 

We have no other satisfying title to im- 
mortality than this, which naturally carries 
little satisfaction to one who only believes 
in Jesus with large reservations. We have 
become so used to the hopefulness of Chris- 
tendom in the face of death, that we need 



238 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

to be even sharply reminded how little basis 
such optimism would have if the life and 
words of Jesus were to be eliminated from 
human knowledge. We should still, so far 
as we can see, be in that chill gloom of pagan 
fear which is reflected in the epitaphs on 
Greek and Roman tombs, in contrast with the 
strange triumphant hopefulness of the early 
Christian inscription in the Catacombs. 
At best, individuals among us would be 
standing where Socrates stood, clinging, in 
spite of popular derision, to the hope that 
the gods had use for us even when earthly 
days were done. But there was little warmth 
or color in such a faith, and at best it rested 
on the marvelous spiritual insight of the 
man himself, which he was pathetically un- 
able to communicate to others. The later 
Jewish faith in a resurrection to judgment 
had small power to commend itself to men 
of other races, as, indeed, it would have ap- 
peared to have little save the fact of a stub- 
born national hope to rest upon. 

It is the influence of Jesus, often un- 
recognized, that has so largely tempered our 
modern attitude to the hereafter, and has so 
profoundly strengthened the moral and 
psychological arguments for a future life. 
And it is well for us to bring this fact for- 
ward into consciousness, both that we may be 
renewedly grateful to him for this hope of 



The Unending Fellowship 239 

all hopes, and that we may better realize 
how the hope, after all, is grounded in a 
genuine fellowship with him. It is not to be 
cheaply had. A Christian heredity, or bap- 
tism into a state church, or a profession of 
faith, does not necessarily make it ours; 
but only, in the ultimate testing, an honest 
heart-loyalty to him. For it is unmistakably 
on this that he rests his anticipations of 
eternal life for his disciples. The con- 
tinuance of personal existence and moral 
responsibility is assumed by him for all 
men; but for the life which is life indeed, 
men are to share it only as they are united 
with him as branches with the vine. 

Perhaps it is not so much on any spe- 
cific words of Jesus that our faith rests, 
as on the whole effect and witness of his 
personality in its bearing on this problem. 
The personality of Jesus was developed in 
time and under our familiar human condi- 
tions; but through and through it was 
related to eternity. If there was no unseen 
yet abiding world of the spirit, in which he 
was a sharer even then, it was a pitiful 
mockery, a dismal enigma. If he was not a 
citizen of two worlds, in very deed and 
truth, he was merely a demented wanderer 
in the world which now is. Judged in the 
light of eternity, his life was intelligible, con- 
vincing, victorious; but if a Roman legionary 



240 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

was able to bring that perfect love and trust 
and hope to utter defeat and annihilation, 
then it was an incongruous and jarring dis- 
cord in the moral world. It was harmonious 
only with eternity; each day of it vibrated 
with the impulse of an endless life. It took 
such hold on God that we simply cannot 
conceive that hold being summarily brought 
to nought by death. 

And his followers' fortunes he bound up 
in the same bundle of life with himself. 
" As I am, so are ye in the world." To- 
gether they were citizens of an everlasting 
Kingdom, the Kingdom of the Father. The 
pantheistic hope of being merged into 
the world-spirit at death, reabsorbed into the 
great ocean of being, would have been ut- 
terly without significance to him. He saw 
how clearly the supreme values of life were 
bound up with personal relations, and it was 
the power of this personal relationship that, 
both for him and the disciples, was to ran- 
som them from the power of the grave. Love 
was the tie that was to hold him and them 
indissolubly to him who had made them for 
himself. And it was because he lived in 
love that he lived in the joyous assurance 
of eternity. 

As to the nature of the life to come and 
the manner of our entrance into it, it is 
sometimes hard for us to be faithful to our 



The Unending Fellowship 241 

own igaorance. We may have started out 
as children with very clear and satisfying 
ideas of heaven, based upon the beautiful 
imagery of the Revelation, in its description 
of the city with streets of gold and gates of 
single pearls. But from this childish sim- 
plicity of faith, so impossible for the mature 
mind, we are borne away, whether we will or 
no, into something that perhaps is not so 
near the truth as the naive literalness of 
childhood. 

Yet our experience could not be otherwise. 
Most thoughtful men come in time to 
recognize that there is no clearly defined 
biblical teaching on this subject, and that all 
efforts to compel from the Bible an explicit 
statement of the manner of our transition 
to the spiritual world, or the sequence and 
nature of the last things, are — and were 
divinely meant to be — vain and unconvinc- 
ing. There are indeed explicit statements 
to be found, even in the New Testament; 
but the more these are pressed into matter-of- 
fact descriptions of literal occurrences, the 
more do we recognize how utterly the reality 
transcends the limitations of such word 
pictures. 

As has often been pointed out, the Bible 
has three distinct strata of belief and teach- 
ing as to the future life. The first, which 
comprehends most of the Old Testament, 



242 Faith of a Middle-x\ged Man 

frankly denies it. The holy men of old, even 
among the chosen people, for the most part 
lived and died without this faith. As the 
Psalmist said, " In death there is no remem- 
brance of Thee; in Sheol who shall give Thee 
thanks.?" (Ps. 6 : 5.) The dead had lost 
their hold on God, as they had lost their 
place on the pleasant earth. They could 
no longer know or praise his goodness. 
As another Psalmist wrote, '' Wilt thou 
show wonders to the dead.? Shall they 
that are deceased arise and praise thee.? 
Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in 
the grave.? Or thy faithfulness in De- 
struction.? Shall thy wonders be known 
in the dark.? And thy righteousness in 
the land of forgetfulness.? " (Ps. 88 : 10- 
12.) Even Hezekiah, in his bitter hunger 
for more days in the sunlight, cried out, 
*' Sheol cannot praise thee, death cannot 
celebrate thee; they that go down into the 
pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, 
the living, he shall praise thee." (Isa. 38 : 18- 
19.) It was a desolate belief, and it cannot 
be wondered at that most people seem 
agreed to forget that it has any place in 
the Bible. 

After the Exile, this was gradually re- 
placed in Jewish thought by the less gloomy 
belief that the dead '' slept in the dust of the 
earth," until the day when they should be 



The Unending Fellowship 243 

summoned forth to judgment. Thus Eze- 
kiel represents Jehovah as saying to the dry 
bones of his vision, " I will open your graves, 
and cause you to come up out of your 
graves, O my people; and I will bring you 
into the land of Israel." (Ezek. 37 : 12.) 
This was the belief that had stiflFened into 
dogma by our Lord's day, and was refused 
only by the sect of the Sadducees. Right- 
eous and wicked alike, the dead were in their 
tombs, waiting the hour when they should be 
called to earth. It was the hereditary and 
rooted conviction of our Lord's disciples, 
and whatever allusions he may have made in 
their hearing to a resurrection had to be 
transmitted through the medium of their un- 
derstanding, colored by these intense pre- 
conceptions. It is a view that is repeatedly 
suggested in the gospels, and even in the 
later writings of the New Testament. 

There was a further unfolding of hope, 
however, that came with the teaching of 
Christ and with ripening Christian experi- 
ence. This confidently counted upon an 
unbroken continuance of the personality and 
of its conscious fellowship with Jesus Christ, 
in spite of physical dissolution. The re- 
awakening to conscious life was not put ofi" 
to some far-distant day at the end of the 
age, but the new life dawned as the weary 
body was laid down. Thus Jesus said to 



244 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

the penitent thief, " This day shalt thou 
be with me in Paradise." He spoke also of 
God as the God of the living, who still main- 
tained fellowship with those who had walked 
with him on earth. Jesus himself even held 
converse with the living spirits of Moses and 
Elijah. He thought of heaven not as a 
place swept bare of all human fellowship by 
the sleep of the grave, but as the scene of 
the richer and deeper communion which he 
promised to his disciples in those many 
mansions. He claimed that he was himself 
the resurrection and the life, so that he who 
lived and believed in him should never die. 
The influence of this teaching appears clearly 
in the later thought of Paul, to whom death 
meant the departing to be with Christ. 
To be absent from the body was to be at 
home with the Lord, which was very far 
better. " For we know," he said, " that if 
the earthly house of our tabernacle be dis- 
solved, we have a building from God, a 
house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens." 

This is the faith which more and more 
comes to be that of the thoughtful Christian 
experience, as it breaks away from bondage 
to the letter, and rests upon the teaching of 
Jesus: that God has made us for himself in 
a fellowship of love that is a joy to him, and 
that cannot be interrupted by the incident of 



The Unending Fellowship 245 

physical death. He that hath the Son 
hath the life. And it is a life that can 
neither be drowned in the darkness of Sheol, 
as Hezekiah feared, nor held for ages sleeping 
in the tomb until the sound of an archangel's 
trumpet. 

It is true we have not the light we would 
wish to have. Only at a few points does it 
seem to reach our need, and at none does it 
relieve our curiosity. Perhaps any considera- 
tion of the theme rouses more perplexities 
than it relieves, so utterly do these things lie 
outside our understanding. Questions rise 
to our lips to die away unanswered. What 
are we to do, e.g., with all that portentous 
apocalyptic imagery of the Last Day — 
'' Day of wrath, that dreadful day, when 
the heavens shall pass away " — when at 
the trumpet blast, every soul of man shall be 
gathered for the Great Assize, to be judged 
out of the things written in a book.'* What 
of the coming with clouds, and the gathering 
of uncounted millions in the air, and the busy 
angels garnering the harvest, and all the 
cataclysmic overturnings of those days of 
doom ? 

Let him answer with assurance who thinks 
he knows where the pictorial element in 
those ancient prophetic imaginings leaves off, 
and where the underlying spiritual reality 
begins. Surely, nowhere would we walk 



246 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

with more humility and reverence for the 
early faith than in the presence of these 
mysteries that so far outrun our power to 
think or see or understand. But we must 
not forget that our faithfulness to the Bible 
is not proportioned to the literalness with 
which we construe its letter, so much as 
to the sympathy and moral insight with 
which we interpret its spirit. Even in the 
lifetime of Paul the apostle, we can see his 
attitude changing toward the problems of the 
future life. And many generations of hum- 
ble reverent seekers for the truth have come 
and gone since then, clarifying our vision of 
the laws of the spiritual life, in life and death. 
And so profoundly have we come to feel the 
silent inevitableness of God's rewards and 
punishments in character, the inseparable 
consequences of sin and holiness, of love and 
hate, that the ancient Jewish conception of 
a distant day of formal awards, with all its 
setting of a material universe convulsed with 
the terror of that crisis, seems to many to 
belong to the pictorial stage of education, 
in the childhood of moral development. 
The truth and the awe of it all are with us 
still, but clothed in different forms, that 
reach home to the understanding of the 
present day. And clear, outstanding, high 
above all veiling metaphors, is the hope of 
endless life for those who take refuge in 



The Unending Fellowship 247 

God. " He that doeth the will of God 
abideth forever.'' 

With this hope we are content. Death is 
the gate of life. Our loved ones are not 
sleeping in the grave; rather do they stand 
" all rapture through and through/' serving 
God in his presence. Amid the infinite 
activities of that spiritual world, passion- 
ately alive, as God is alive, to the needs of 
this stricken earth, we believe that our 
Father has other uses for them than to leave 
their spirits, trained and tempered to his 
holy uses, in silent sleep while the crowded 
millenniums of the struggle for the Kingdom 
wear heavily on for lack of helpers. Rather 
have they gone up to the help of the Lord 
against the mighty. Amid the boundless 
multitudes of those who have gone out into 
the other world untaught, untrained, un- 
developed — like the hosts of little children 
on whom infinite labors of love must yet be 
spent — there is place enough for every re- 
deemed life, chastened and made sweet and 
wise by earth's discipline, to find needy and 
joyous avenues of service, even in the heav- 
enly city. It is thus that we interpret our 
Lord's parable of the good servant, found 
faithful in a few things and made ruler over 
many things. The reward of that servant, 
entering into the joy of his Lord, was to 
bend his shoulder to new and heavier burdens 



248 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

— glorious burdens, that angels might wish 
to carry, in that new-found heavenly strength. 

This is the well-grounded hope that is 
cheering the heart today of many a man and 
woman, laid helplessly aside from any share 
in the great work of the Kingdom here below, 
and waiting, through long useless years of 
pain and weariness, for another chance to 
feel the keen delight of uttermost activity 
in the forefront of need. Theirs is, with 
Stevenson, the " dingy battlefield of the bed 
and physic bottle." But they will hear the 
bugle call again! No fear! Because their 
Lord lives, they shall live also; and as his 
life is the very energy of love, so shall they 
presently find their place in that blessed 
ministry of service at his side. 

This, then, is the outlook upon life that 
belongs to those who believe in Jesus — 
an outlook immensely wide and satisfying, 
full of dignity and promise. Our immediate 
present may be choked with care, and barred 
irrevocably from any free advance to new 
possessions. But our future is unbounded, 
and our capacity for life has hardly yet been 
drawn upon. Our horizon is as broad as the 
mercies of God, and when evening has really 
come, we shall know that the greater day of 
life is just about to dawn. 

Here on the open desert where these 
words are written, the world in which we 



The Unending Fellowship 249 

live is wonderful for its spaciousness. The 
dawn breaks every morning on a far straight 
horizon, as of the ocean. The sun rolls up, 
a disc of molten gold, above the desert rim. 
All day it moves amid the great silent spaces 
of the sky, with neither smoke nor cloud to 
dim its grandeur. And when night falls, the 
constellations go wheeling through the heav- 
ens, in the same solemn splendor as once 
before the eyes of Job, until they set behind 
the mountain wall. The silence, the spa- 
ciousness, the endless wonder of this illimita- 
ble pageantry, bring rest and comfort to the 
soul. The very memory of the restlessness of 
great cities is faint and far away. 

It is somewhat so that life lies open to 
him who believes in Jesus. It is majestic 
in its amplitude. To multitudes it is close 
and feverish and full of disappointment. 
Even its rosy promises are but illusion that 
quickly passes, leaving one embittered with 
the tantalization of its mocking beauty. 
But our hunger for life, to its very last thrill 
of eager longing, is a true promise of the 
satisfaction that shall be. He that wrought 
us for this very thing is God. Our Lord 
came that we might have life and have it 
abundantly. Even if we are past the me- 
ridian, we have hardly yet begun to taste how 
good the waters of life are. The best is yet 
to be. " Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 



250 Faith of a Middle-Aged Man 

neither have entered into the heart of man, 
the things that God hath prepared for them 
that love him." 

And so, setting ourselves in quiet con- 
fidence to the task of each new day, we also 
say by faith, with that hard-pressed comrade 
in the good fight, " Thanks be unto God, 
which giveth us the victory through our Lord 
Jesus Christ.'' 



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